Look into possibility of operating the camera with OpenCV in Ubuntu

[rmcreyes]

Describe what aspect of our project needs to be researched It seems like one of options for interfacing with a camera with USB requires use of OpenCL. Given that our computer vision app for detecting license plates uses OpenCV as well, look into ways we can integrate camera operation with the existing PoC for license plate detection.

Additional context Some previous research tickets that might have useful information: #3 #4 More specifically, the research done in #3 links to this repository, which specifically deals with interfacing a USB camera to the DE1 via OpenCV.

Please close this ticket either by merging some documentation or leaving comments under this ticket.

[andreamah]

Used motion library in from apt-get to operate camera and test; webcam works on ubuntu.

• Trying to get openCV installed to out ubuntu 16.04 LTE... pretty difficult since apt-get's cmake is too old and need to manually upgrade to pip install openCV Used OpenCV to capture video live and see if it can identify plate on live video; has a bit of trouble finding the plate sometimes.

[andreamah]

OpenCV can be loaded with the following:

• updating cmake to the latest version using this tutorial: https://askubuntu.com/a/865294 (you need to manually download and compile cmake, which will take a couple hours..). The apt-get package for cmake in 16.04 LTE is too old to download numpy, so you can't just use sudo apt-get upgrade cmake.
• Then, you can run pip install opencv-python --verbose to download. This will take another few hours

NOTES:

• You may want to re-partition the system for more storage and modify the swap file for more memory (I used ~2GB swap). See https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/933 for partitioning and https://itsfoss.com/create-swap-file-linux/ for swapfile creation