Home
About Us
Methods of Recording
CMU Cam
Research
Uses
Journal

The CMUcam was designed by The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a low cost detection camera for mobile robots. The CMUcam is capable of doing many different tasks including tracking the position and size of a colorful object, measure the RGB or YUV statistics for an object, automatically acquire and track the first object it sees, and many more.

The CMUcam is capable of reading images in two different color encoding formats, RGB and YUV. RGB is the most common color coding system in cameras. The camera takes in the light and converts that into three numbers, one for RED, one for GREEN, and one for BLUE. Adjusting any of these numbers leads to differnet colors and/or brightness of that image.

YUV is a less common color coding system and is mainly used in broadcast television. YUV is broken down into three channels; a grayscale, a blue, and a red. The advantage of using YUV in television is it reduces the amount of information needed to define a TV image. The human visual has poor color acuity so if RGB is converted to YUV a human will not notice the loss in color detail. The disadvantage of YUV is this compression of the image reduces the color range of the image which can lead to conversion errors if the image is to be converted back to RGB.

RGB vs. YUV