Re: AST - Vision Plus LRO/New Concepts

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

Reposting article removed by rogue canceller.

In article ou812many@aol.com (OU812Many) writes...
>
>Not me.  I had the source code for ComputerEyesGS a long time ago when a
>company wanted me to write a version of Allison for it.  Sparce comments.
>Even stranger was the way they calibrated the board.   Problem was, the
>board wasn't up to the task.  It was slow, slow, and in the end would have
>only done a third of the stuff the AST board could do.

    Agreed. The main limitation of the ComputerEyes GS was the time
required to capture an image. About 12 seconds to scan the video 
source and then 4 seconds to calculate the color palette (even for 
B&W greyscale!). You also _must_ disable your accelerator, it requires 
precise timing. This adds a few more seconds while it sends the final
image to your display, up to 20 seconds in total from the time you
tell it to capture till you have the digitized scan. You can cut down
the capture time to 6 seconds for the scan (not including palette time)
but the quality goes down a fair bit, not worth it IMO.

    Not being a real-time capture board means your video source has
to be perfectly still, so you must use a freeze-frame VCR. Capturing
from a TV is impossible and capturing live subjects (friends, family,
pets) is quite difficult to say the least. Greyscale scans using a
camcorder are quite good all things considered; color scans aren't
too hot, although as I mentioned before anime and cartoons seem to
work nicely. :-)

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca