Computer Vision and Image Acquisition for mobile computing

Hi everyone,

I'm currently in the planning stages of a project in which I need a highly mobile and low powered computer to run video processing with attached peripherals such as cameras and radar/lidar speed detectors. Ideally I would like to create my own matlab program to handle data collection from the peripheral devices and the image processing.

The trouble I'm having is selecting a computing device that can handle everything. I'd like to incorporate a quad core micro pc, but I haven't found any examples of people running matlab on such a device. Has anyone in the community done such a thing? Perhaps by booting Linux? Also, what are the capabilities of Matlab Mobile? Can it utilize toolboxes like computer vision and image acquisition?

I've tried contacting Mathworks about this, but I haven't received any response yet. I figured folks in the mathworks community might have tried something like this already.

Answer 1

[Ashish Uthama]

What are your:

• Budget constraints
• Power constraints? (Battery or always on AC power?
• Performance constraints? I cant get a good feel of how much compute horse power you would need without knowing what kind of analysis you want (just logging, or processing? can the processing be done off-line or later?).

You could build/buy a small PC. search for HTPC "Home Theater PC", they come in small form factors, decent price to performance ratio and usually have enough ports to hook up your data devices. You could then install a low foot-print Linux distro and run MATLAB on top of it.

[Aaron]

As far as budget is concerned, I would really like to keep it under $500-$600. I could probably go higher, but I'm shooting to save everyone money.

Power constraints: This system is going to be run on solar charged 12vdc batteries. I like the idea of powering the system via MicroUSB, through a cig adapter.

Processing could potentially be done later, as long as all data is time stamped. I would like to be able to access the system remotely, maybe using an aircard on a 3g/4g network (these systems are likely to be deployed in rural areas at times). If no network is available, it will be necessary to write everything to a removable hard drive.

I've been very interested in the low footprint linux distros, and I've been playing around with puppy Slacko 5.5 lately (considering using it for this project). One of my questions for mathworks was whether or not I'm entitled to downloads of matlab for linux AND windows platforms as a single end user.

[Aaron]

Oh, and I should have been more clear about the performance. I want to use image acquisition toolbox to run an attached camera, and then grab data from multiple polls as objects break defined planes in the picture.