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Tracking a self lighted sphere in night conditions

Pixy Hardware
#1

Hello guys!
we’re trying to follow a single self lighted ping pong ball (around 2m) in night conditions.

Everything works well, except when room luminosity becomes really dark, then Pixy cam seem to apply a dark filter on entire frame, (even on the lighted ball) which is a bit paradoxal !

it seems there is a filter activated by Pixycam in really low light condition which force the image to be even darker when there a very low contrast or poor details…
this doesnt happen with standard cam: in manual mode, lighted ball keep its luminosity whatever the environnement light conditions…

using manual brightness or frame rate in PixYMon doesnt change anything,

any idea ?
is there a way to use the cam in a (real)full manual mode ?

thank you very much

b

#2

Hello,
If the ball is lighted, you might consider disabling auto exposure correction:
https://docs.pixycam.com/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:v2:pixymon_index#camera-tab

For illuminated targets, it’s important that the camera doesn’t overexpose (e.g. when the target is white because of overexposure), so biasing the exposure such that the target is nicely exposed often results in the background being underexposed (dark).

Hope this helps.

Edward