Hi all, I would like to build an omnidirectional video camera system, that can capture a 360° degree view of a scene, similar to the ladybug camera by pointgrey (http://www.ptgrey.com/products/ladybug2/index.asp). Such a system would probably consist of 4 or 5 cameras rotated by 90 or 72 degrees each, and maybe another one pointing upwards. They should all capture images in parallel.
Since it should be quite cheap (but high quality), my only option is to use webcams, either based on USB or Firewire (although the only affordable firewire camera I found, the Fire-I seems to be out of production). I have a single Philips 740K camera, which has a nice picture quality and provides a standard M12x0.5 lens screw mount, so I can mount some third party wide angle lens. However, it is limited to USB 1.1, that will lead to a very limited framerate, I fear. Therefore I'm thinking about using USB2 webcams, such as the Logitech Fusion or Pro 5000, to increase the overall framerate I can archive with this driver. The question now is, which framerate could I expect from 5 UVC USB2 cameras connected to a single laptop? Or is there a principal problem of using that amount of cameras at the same time? On https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/linux-uvc-devel/2006-March/000365.html, David Moore noticed: > Hi, I'm interested in connecting more than one camera at once, > specifically, a pair of Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000s. > I only have one at the moment, but when I run it at full uncompressed > resolution (640x480x30fps YUV), it chooses an ISO endpoint with a packet > size of 3060 bytes. This is more than half of the available ISO > bandwidth. (cat /proc/bus/usb/devices claims it's 60%) Is there a compression method supported by the cameras (for example MJPEG), that would lead to higher compression, thus allowing a higher total framerate? Btw. Thanks a lot for developing this driver! ciao Pablo __________________________________________________________________________ Erweitern Sie FreeMail zu einem noch leistungsstärkeren E-Mail-Postfach! Mehr Infos unter http://freemail.web.de/home/landingpad/?mc=021131 _______________________________________________ Linux-uvc-devel mailing list Linux-uvc-devel@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-uvc-devel
