Laser target shooting (finding laser spot location)

Hello Everybody,

I want to get expert opinions about how we can find/measure the position of a few millisecond long laser spot on an A4 size of target area.

Although my application notting to do with shooting, using the "laser target shooting" analogy will help. In these days we can buy small red laser diodes just for few dolars. Assume we have one of them. The Laser diode will be connected to a microcontroller which will trigger (turn on and off for few millisecond) the diode. (If required, I think we can also modulate the laser diode for few KHz ).

We will point this laser and trigger to a target area of approximatelly

20x30 cm in size and at a distance of 25-50meters. Now the question; on the target, how we can find the position of this laser spot?

I know there are some laser shooting targets which practically doing this. How they work?

Thx.

Favne Reas

Reply to
Favne Reas
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Reply to
JGCASEY

I am not an expert here.

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I believe they use a CCD imager to monitor the target area. This could be mounted directly behind a diffusive screen, or above/to the side of a reflective target. A high-speed camera (>200Hz for 5ms laser flashes) would be needed. To use something cheap like a webcam (

Reply to
D Herring

How accurate do you need this position ? What sort of precision do you need ? Must the target be portable ? At one end of the spectrum you need lots of sensors in a grid, which can be read. On the other end of the spectrum, you can use optics + mechanics to direct the beam into a sensor. Based on time, and the mechanical position you can determine position.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Reply to
Anton Erasmus

Thank you for the link. I liked their "Laser Target Finder Sensor". The content of this link is fantastic. It explains their system in very good details. Also the small movie file demonstrates its use.

But, my application is slightly different. I need to know the location of the laser beam pulse on the target with 5-10mm accuracy. As one suggested may be a high speed camera would be usefull. But if we try to identify only the coded/modulated laser rather than any red light, than I tink we need to have something else or something additional to high speed camera.

Any suggestion?

Reply to
Favne Reas

On 2005-09-10, Favne Reas wrote: [...]

  1. Turn the laser on.
  2. Capture a frame from the camera, call this image A.
  3. Turn the laser off.
  4. Capture a frame from the camera, call this image B.
  5. C = A - B (pixel by pixel difference)
  6. Apply a little fuzzy matching to identify the red spot in C.

Essentially, what I'm suggesting is to forget about modulating or coding the laser signal, except to the extent that turning it on and off in sync with the frame rate of the camera can be considered modulation. Step (6) is where the magic is, but if your camera is decent and the elapsed time between (2) and (4) is minimal, it should be pretty easy. If you put a filter on the camera that's matched to the wavelength of your laser, you're almost certain to get it right in the absence of malicious attempts to fool the sensor. You won't be able to have multiple sensors operating at the same time with the same field of view, unless they are tightly coordinated or use different wavelengths.

Reply to
Randall Nortman

In fact the exact 'inverse' of this approach, was what was used for the early raster scan display 'light pen' systems, where a bright spot was scanned across the display, and when the pen 'saw' the spot, the X,Y coordinates where the detector in the pen was pointed could be estimated. The approach outlined, lends itself to simply synchronising the laser to the frame sync pulse, activating the laser on alternate frames. Then the point with the largest change between alternate frames, is the image of the point where the beam is pointing. The faster the camera sync rate, the faster the detection can be, and the better the rejection of other sources. At the 'crude' end of the design, you could even ignore complexities in matching, and do a direct frame to frame compare.

Best Wishes

Reply to
Roger Hamlett

Using a filter will be a key element here. A filter having only a narrow (10 A to 50 A) bandpass at the laser wavelength will make the camera think it's the dead of night, except for the laser spot. At a guess, you might get one of these for $50 new -- or maybe Sam will have leads to surplus sources.

Reply to
AES

for a simple machine vision solution using an NTSC camera with appropriate supporting hardware and software and lensing, you should be able to reliably detect the pointer to within ~1/2 pixel assuming that you digitize your frame at 640x480 pixels, and align it so that the sensor is in the same orientation as the target, that should allow you to achieve spatial resolution on the order of 30cm*1/(640*2)= ~.25mm. Higher resolution cameras would allow for better spatial resolution

This assumes that your laser is bright enough to be noticable at 30 frames/sec--you may find that you need to go to a faster camera to detect a short, weak pulse. Also, cameras do not acquire images continuously--for an exposure on the order of a couple milliseconds, you may need two "out of sync" cameras set up so that on is collecting an image while the other is in its blank phase.... If you can increase the laser pulse time to something greater that a full camera frame cycle, things get much easier....

Reply to
Michael

With a webcam, (or video camera + frame grabber) a cheap spotting scope or telephoto lens, and a pc you can resolve the position of a light flash on a screen to a resolution of about 1 part in 500 of the dimensions of the screen in both axis. The target can be any difuse reflective surface like a sheet of paper or even a completly random background. I've written software which can measure the positon of a spot on a video image to better than one pixel using centroiding but for a different application and not available for distribution. Still, it's within the capability of any decent programmer. Cost for all the hardware except a typical P4 PC should be under $300. Higher resolution and faster camers are available with digital interfaces but cost more.

You can download source code for the program "gspy" from

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which runs under Linux. While it is intended as a securiity camera program it has all the routines to grab and analyze video images and to locate groups of adjacent pixels which change. It's close to what's needed for the above application.

Reply to
Louis Boyd

Good explanation, but I think he needs a coordinate, not just being able to identify the point in the frame.

This might involve recognizing some fiducial marks. In the absense of marks, this problem may be unsolvable.

If an absolute vector is acceptable, the high res rotary encoders measuring elevation and azimuth may be OK. This is getting expensive.

There is a company in Austin that makes 3d digitizers using this method. I think they use time of flight to get the distance, which makes this even more exotic (=expensive).

Reply to
Bryan Hackney

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 00:05:49 +1000, in article snipped-for-privacy@k.com "Favne Reas" wrote: ...

Well whatever you use is going to need some form of optics in front, so is this going to be a fixed distance or any distance position finding?

Look at Hamamatsu Position Sensitive Detectors, that give an XY on a sensor that is focused as required. Primarily meant for cameras and industrial applications.

They have various application notes, which are quite detailed, I was looking at for one application.

A google search on "Hamamatsu PSD" will give various other references including a Circuit Cellar project for laser level using a 1D sensor. You obviously need a 2D sensor from their range.

-- Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services GNU H8 & mailing list info For those web sites you hate

Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Can you be more specific about your actual application? Could the target for example be a television screen? If a television screen you could use the method that shoot em up games use to determine what part of the screen the "gun" is pointed.

Reply to
JGCASEY

As this is an international group, the above is true for NTSC and VGA resolution cameras. Many other resolutions exist including lots of low end 'security', webcam, mobile phone cameras of lower resolution, some of which you will be lucky to see more than 500 discrete pixels in a line and may well give a cropped image.

Hmm depends if you want a 'spot is about here' or want to measure to better repeatable accuracy, as most measuring algorithms rely on at least 5 pixels per edge to avoid aliasing issues. Other methods rely on multiple frame averaging (of the images or data from images) to avoid fluctuations in light and camera noise affecting the 'edges'. Also the spot size on target will change at changing distances, this problem is something dealt with by laser theodolites and range finders. See also laser spot targets used on firearms and pointers the size of the spot is larger than the sending aperture.

That assumes the target can be illuminated to a controlled level. I have seen many targets indoors that have been messed up by time of day, even the humble IR sensing of a mouse that at certain times of day and users with small hands as the sun comes in from different windows. If this is external all sorts of things can confuse the equipment, traverse of sun, birds and other objects in line of sight (even temporarily). I have seen video measurements messed up due to wind moving trees causing varying shadow over an object, hence giving relatively large levels of light fluctation in the camera.

That really depends on the output level of the laser and spot size at the distance relative to ambient CONDITIONS. At the distance stated in the first post external conditions do come into play, especially what to do if no spot found (if taking one frame and the whole image is one large spot).

I am reminded of the professor at a local university who went to run a local half-marathon with a 'follow-me' robot, that basically followed a pulsing IR light source. As soon as the course direction changed to a more southerly direction, the robot wandered off following the sun!

Light only travels very long distances in a vacuum.

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Reply to
Paul Carpenter

THe typical TV camera has about 600 pixels per line and there are 480 lines. With a target area of 300x400mm this means that you'll easily be able to get

1mm accuracy in the point which is much better than the 10mm that you need. Illuminate the target to get about 10% gray and the spot will probalby saturate the camera which means that you just need to know where the more than 50% illumination is and the 10% will give the outline of the target. If you're running a CCD or CMOS accay and are able to access the imageer direct, I've got a simple program in QuickBasic on my website
formatting link
that will show you where to go with the software. The program is GUIDE and it uses an early B&W webcam that the commands are available for to do the imaging. For additional help, there is another astro camera that used the parallel port to directly acces the imager chip called the Cookbook Camera for how the circuits in the camera work for such an application. Today, if I was to do a job like yours, I'd probably do a PIC processor type processor and drive the imageer chip from that.

-- Why do penguins walk so far to get to their nesting grounds?

Reply to
Bob May

I can attest that finding centroids of edge-enhanced, frame-differenced images can locate spots of interest in extremely noisy images.

Reply to
Everett M. Greene

Hmm depends if you want a 'spot is about here' or want to measure to better repeatable accuracy, as most measuring algorithms rely on at least 5 pixels per edge to avoid aliasing issues

THe guy was going to be happy with 10mm accuracy. Nearly filling the image with the target will give near the accuracy of the full image size. Even at a 400x400 pixel size, it is merely a little math to get to find out where the spot is iwth greater accuracy than is needed. In addition, doing a subtraction of the unlit image with the lit image will subtract out all of the background quite nicely and even a simple centroidin of the spot will be better than is needed. The program on my website has all of the math needed to find out where the spot is - after all, the program is designed to track a star for autoguiding a telescope for photographing the star field of interest. It downloads an image from the camera and detects where the star is in the field and provides an error correction to put the scope back to where it is supposed to be. Much of that logic isn't needed (the tracking part) but the finding of the star in the image part will do a vey nice job for him. Target illumination is more that of makign sure that the background around the target is not going to be brighter than the target and the illumination level is intended to find the position of the target in the image. This is an optional item tho as just knowing where the camera is pointed will be sufficient probably for the original poaster. These are all minor problems that can easily be solved by intelligent use of the camera and laser pointer. Get a positive attitude and all problems can be solved.

-- Why do penguins walk so far to get to their nesting grounds?

Reply to
Bob May

Please leave attributions in.

That all depends on circumstances, I have seen many a 'simple subtraction of xx image' screwed up by beat frequencies of lighting.

Star tracking has different issues to daylight image processing, internal or external.

At all times the illumination has to be constant to be effective, otherwise the background subtraction FAILS. At the original distance of 25-50m that is not always guaranteed.

MINOR problems, in over 20 years of dealing with image processing in lots of market places (industrial, medical, security, leisure and others). the most common problems are illumination, lenses, and wrong sensor (type or use of it). These are the most overlooked aspects. Forgetting the classic ones like "why can't I stream high resolution images as raw data to a USB 1 hard drive".

Helps if you know BEFORE hand what problems you are trying to solve and what is going to bite you. Too many people think imaging is simple and attempt applications that are way beyond the simple kit they think will do anything.

For many reasons including avoiding the worst winds.

Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Then I suggest you reread the thread for a different possible solution to investigate I did indeed propose. Which may or may not be practical without knowing more about the application.

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Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Yppe, the illumination of the target is indeed important. I did assume that if the guy saw such a problem, he'd solve it in the proper fashion. I'm not here to provide the problems but rather answer his question and as such, all I heve heard from you is how he can't do it. I'll note that tracking a star does include the actual finding of that star in the image and that is the part of the software that he should be looking at. The whole process of tracking isn't needed by him and that part of the program should be ignored. Yet, you ignorantly state that because the program is designed to track a star, it isn't relavent at all to his problem.

May you reinvent the wheel everytime that you need one!

-- Why do penguins walk so far to get to their nesting grounds?

Reply to
Bob May

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