Washout under florescent lights!

Once I had BotGuy, an example orange ping-pong ball, and the maroon cube that will be used in the KIPR Open, I proceeded to try some quick tests with several webcams.



What I noticed was that under medium florescent lights, the maroon cube goes almost dark because it absorbs light, BotGuy has an intense reflection from his chest, and the ping-pong ball exhibits a lot of specular reflection rendering it almost white to the camera. This will be much more pronounced in the glaring lights during the KIPR Open. I also cannot rule out that the location where the Game will be held will not have a lot of natural lighting as well, compounding the problem. This is going to raise some interesting issues in the image processing. I most certainly will have to switch from RGB processing to HSV in order to account for the light levels. This will involve a little more processing than I wanted to do, but it will be worth it in the end. HSV stands for hue, saturation, and value. I should be able to pull out colors in the scene without having to deal with the light intensity levels.

Update: this situation is even more pronounced on the Clique Cam00131 Webcam (part of the CBC package). The above picture was taken using a Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD. I was going to use the Clique webcam but when I saw the washout I knew that I needed to concentrate on the image processing.