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Detect Fluorescent paint on a UV background

Pixy Software
#1

Hi all,
My daughter has a project for school which i’m helping with. We are trying to detect when a certain colour crosses the field of view. To make matters more exciting, the colour will only appear under a UV light - like invisible ink under uv. It’s not obvious to me how to train the camera to detect this.

The UV is visible when turned on and it floods the field of view for the camera. The ‘ink’ fluoresces and the colour is like a small square of pink, on a diffuse blue (the uv) background. Unfortunately using the button on top of the pixy (2) to train the image detects when the uv light comes on - i need it to detect when the uv light is on AND the fluorescing colour is present.

Can anyone suggest what conditions would be good for this - background, light intensity etc - and how best to train the pixy to detect the fluorescence under UV light?

Also, is it normal for the pixy to get hot? I managed to overload the USB on my laptop today and this has me concerned for a demo that might take days!

Sean

#2

Hi Sean,
It sounds like a fun project :slight_smile: Pixy should be able to see the fluorescing color fine under UV light, and you should be able to train Pixy to detect the color either through the button-teach method or by selecting the object in PixyMon.

Are you finding that Pixy is having trouble seeing the object?

It is true that Pixy’s processor runs pretty warm. When we switched to the smaller processor package, we noticed that the temperature went up. It’s normal for the processor to get quite warm.

Edward

#3

The camera is struggling to differentiate between the background illuminated by the LED - like a uv blue/purple colour, and the fluorescing colour - i’ll keep playing with it.

#4

It could be an under or over-exposure problem. Or maybe what you are trying to detect is small, in which case, teaching through Pixymon is the way to go:

https://docs.pixycam.com/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:v2:teach_pixy_an_object_2#teaching-through-pixymon

Please post a picture of a PixyMon grab.