Visual Tracking Gimbal Control

Hey peeps,

So I've been playing around with drone videography lately, find it really hard to film stuff while controlling the camera gimbal to keep things i'm interested in frame.

Being a roboticist, I hacked together a working prototype that uses the video stream to track anything I want, using computer vision algorithms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJW9ReKU-0I&list=UUy6SYEB_Gk40j9NOy8RI5aQ

Currently, I have a video tracking software running on PC and control a gimbal to keep the region of interest I select in frame. I'm also planning  to dev. an android/ipad app so that you can just multi-touch define a subject with 2 fingers.

Is anyone out there also be into something like this? Would love to hear your feedback!

Thanks in advanced

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      • Moderator

        It's a pleasure! Our use would be for anti-poaching, we could track a car or animal or poacher without having to fight with controlling our gimbal with a joystick in heavy winds. So ours is just one example of a use for good...

        • Fantastic use case! Would love to see some example footage of that. What drones do you use for anti-poaching purposes? Fixed wings or copters? Feel free to message me and we would love to hear more about how we can help with the cause! 

  • Great respect !!!

    verifiable fly a large Octacopter with a 4K Sony camera. The gimbal is 32 bits served by the new ALEXMOS Basecam controller on 2 axes with a separate remote control. How can you integrate your super program in this system. And what would it cost for me? Best regards from Germany, ciao Klaus www.luftbild-shs.de3701942708?profile=original

  • Hey guys,

    Thanks to your awesome feedback from you guys about our work on vision-based tracking and intelligence for drones, we improved our algorithms and packaged them into a feature-rich product for aerial film-makers, and we’re pretty excited to share with you all today. Here is a quick demo video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_DdVMLJa5U

    For more details, please check out our blog posts on DIYDrone News here. Thanks again and I look forward to hearing from you guys!

    Yan

     

     

  • Awesome Yan Ma.

    Do you plan to share your algo ?

    very interesting 

  • Very cool! Congratulations and thanks for sharing.

    I've been doing something similar for red balloon tracking (for the AVC 2014 competition) on a BBB but never got past the mavlink integration with Pixhawk. This was not gimbal control,  the idea was to have the actual copter itself fly towards a target via visual tracking. To my knowledge Randy has actually successfully done this on an odroid: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/red-balloon-finder

    Restricting control to the gimbal is a great direction for precise and smooth framing.

  • That is a great feature!!! very good job.

    Is your processor able to follow an object from diferent viewing angles as it will be the case for example in a copter if you circle around an object where this object will be the ROI to aim with the camera?

    • Yes to a certain degree. This demo sort of shows it:

      There are cases where it fails though, and that's what makes it fun right :)
      • Very impressive, I think that's the initial idea of Hexo+ project.

        Maybe you could contact them, they should be interested by your work!

  • Awesome work! Creating a 'add-on' visual gimbal controller package could be quite useful to many.

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