FraMe : Design and construction of an automatically framing camera mount

Abstract: The scope of this bachelor’s thesis was to investigate the use of infrared light to track an object in an image. The goal of the report was to build a full-scale prototype of a camera mount to understand what type of setup is ideal for delivering good tracking performance with infrared (IR) light, an IR-camera and a reflector. The tracker used IR-lights that shines light on the reflector which makes it the brightest spot in the image. Visible light was removed with an analog filter in front of the camera. A microcomputer, in this case a Raspberry Pi 3B+ was used to process the image from the camera, find the brightest spot and then turn the camera with two servo-motors. This resulted in a twoaxis motion that made sure that the brightest spot always stays in the middle of the frame. The testing of the system was done in two steps. First of all, five different shapes of reflector was tested to establish which shape ensures the best tracking performance, in all lighting conditions. The results from the testing was then compared to other visionbased tracking methods covered in other bachelorss thesis’ at KTH. The results showed that IR-tracking perform well in conditions with low ambient light while other visionbased tracking methods, like color tracking works better in conditions with lots of light.