@Nomad.... the new (version 2) ezb4 camera is in everything now.... The old (Version 1) ezb4 camera has been discontinued...

@DJ Thanks again for the explanation....

dj thank you&rr

I also purchased the new cameras and tried them for a short moment last night. I also find the picture to be very dark compared to the old one. But my old cam is dead so i really can not compare them. But with the old one I could do colortracking when i had my ceiling LED spotlights on. The new one gets strange colours. Like blue gets green, yellow is grey and so on. It almost look lite when you use a cheap camera without IR-blocking filter.

I read what DJ said about the camera adapting, maybe it will if I leave it on for a while. I´ll try after work today.

Also what does the colours of the LED on mean ?

I think what's happening here is misunderstanding what your eyes see vs what the computer sees. Generally, cameras that are pleasant to our eyes emphasize red, to be warmer. Where a neutral color balance would appear duller. The reason the old camera produced challenges defining colors for tracking was due to this scenario. The old camera had difficulties isolating and identifying reds without a lot of false positives. As you recall, red was detected everywhere on the old camera... In your skin. In anything brown. In reflections. Everywhere! It was a pain to track red - yet, it shouldn't be.

The same applied to blue and green except worse. Green was the hardest to track on the old camera because it wasn't a strong color due to the warmth that made your eyes like it. Green was practically impossible to get right, before.

The new camera, even though it's not totally new - it's just different in the sense that it's optimized for natural colors and tracking. Remember, these aren't go-pros, this is computer vision. Any enhancements or changes made to the platform are to benefit robotics, not home movies or photos of your kids. The contrast and brightness stability makes tracking consistent by limiting level saturation and auto correction.

The challenge with past customer support issues regarding the old camera was poor quality lighting. People would have issues due to their poor lighting conditions, mostly too dark or too direct. Of course the old camera would attempt to compensate for those poor lighting conditions - and therefore return over saturated colors that may look great to your eyes, are not real colors and therefore not great for tracking. These poor quality lighting scenarios would negatively affect vision tracking experienced. People would say "but the image looks fine with my eyes and the computer sees everything as red". Well, yeah, that's because the image levels were modified for your eyes, which affected also every variable for the tracking configuration... Leaving the tracking configuration useless.

The solution to was to make a decision. Are we a GoPro company? Or a robot company?

So, while the newer camera design does have many features enhanced to robotics, it's not a GoPro.

The much wider field lense is also something that will affect the image and lighting. The larger imaged field of view means less pixel detail. So think of it this way, there's far more image but the same number of pixels. Does that make sense? Your robot can see more, but at the same resolution. Increased field of view makes tracking a whole new experience.

You're going to love the new field of view. And I don't mean "oh that's neat" kind of love. It's going to provide a whole new amazing experience. The robot can see further in each direction, which means it can find and track the object easier! A lot easier. It's really really great.

So, long as there's an understanding that ezrobot cameras are designed for vision tracking and image level stability, and that we're not a GoPro - it makes sense.

If you're having issues with past tracking configurations, the solution is to update the configuration settings for the new camera and enjoy the image stability that you are about to experience.

If you find the image is too dark or colors are strange, then the solution is to fix the poor lighting condition.

I would have to say that we have gained a great deal of experience over the last year. By evaluating customer support inquiries and forum issues when the "custom color tracking" tutorial was launched. The number of people with problems tracking colors was high. So we looked at the algorithms first, and they all were flawless in ezrobot's consistent lighting condition. Then we tried in different "living room" and "bedroom" lighting conditions and suddenly we experiences the issues.

Now, we had always been aware of the red saturation condition that returned false positives. I mean, this has been a problem that plagued vision tracking forever - because historically usb web cameras are used. And what are usb web cameras designed for? Making us look good on skype! And that means enhancing colors, specifically reds.

So, now that ezrobot, unlike all other robot companies, has an extremely large dataset of users to analyze from. All our decisions for new product features of changes are based on your experiences. It would be expensive to task ezrobot staff at "fixing" something which wasn't broken. Or purposely making something worse - we would have been out of business long ago

The changes to the camera were performed due to customer feedback of inconsistent tracking experiences and our tests proved it.

The new camera may not make your GoPro friends jealous - but your robot's tracking experience will.

Hi Dj,

Will the new wireless camera coming in the future have this enhancement ? I assume much more will be able to be done due to a wider field of view and tracking ability.

Ron R

Android, the camera available today has the enhancements mentioned in my above post. The camera that is available today is a newer version, even though it was a silent release.

Ok so now i tried tracking. It works way better with the new camera even if the Picture looks a bit odd to me. It was when I used it like a telepresence robot I noticed the different Picture.

What does the different colors on the camera LED indicate? Is it for future use?

Yes, it does track way better.... Green, yellow and blue now track well too... I haven't tried other tracking types yet, but I will later....