Raspberry Pi "High Quality Camera"

Contributing and equipment
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You may know that there is a new camera for the Raspberry Pi, The High Quality Camera:

It’s a game changer!
12.3 megapixel Sony IMX477 sensor, 7.9mm diagonal image size (1/2.3"), and back-illuminated sensor architecture, with adjustable back focus and support for C- and CS-mount lenses

Its sensor is the same size as what we found in standard action camera.

I plan to build some software and hardware to use it for Mapillary. My goals are:

  • Control the Pi from a web browser
  • On the fly localization and heading
  • Adjust the timelapse interval with the car/bike speed.
  • Real-time or Post-process localization to get centimeter accuracy.

First, I need to:

  • Find a better lens with a wide FOV. (about 1mm fixed-focal lens would gives a 150° horizontal FOV)
  • Compare image quality vs an action cam
  • Test how fast you can capture images
  • Add a gnss receiver
  • Add an IMU
  • Write the software
  • 3d print an enclosure

Then I could try to add more HQ-cam (Pi compute module or Arducam multicam adapter or stereoPi) and perhaps build a new 360° cam

3 Likes
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Looks great! Lets us know for feedback :+1:

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Hello! I had the same idea right now, did you have any success?

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We’re having a lot of fun with this idea over here:

We’ve got to build out the documentation, but come on over: having an audience to write for helps a lot in building it.

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Looks promising! I wish I had more time for tinkering… So the BOM here is around 500€ I guess?

1 Like
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Yes, depending on GPS quality and whether a differential base station is included, BOM is 500-800.

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Hi!
I didn’t spent much time on this as I have some other projects and my first tests were not very successful:

  • The lens I bought have a lot of chromatic abberations
  • I could not take images with an interval lower than 0.7s
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Hi!

What’s your status on this project? Do you have a working prototype ?

I worked on a similar idea a few years ago with 4 Yi action cam

For the stitching job, I used a lot of code from OpenPathView.

btw: for the raspberry pps time sync, I have this working solution on my gnss base station:

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I dig that setup! Yeah: first working prototype built. It’s waiting in Virginia to head to Tanzania. So, I need to build another one and keep testing.

In the interest of fairness: I haven’t played yet with stitching, as this is meant first as a rig for photogrammetry. But, we’ll soon test synthetic 360 views using scripts here: ODM/contrib/blender at master · OpenDroneMap/ODM · GitHub – the idea being to use the full reconstruction in the pipeline. This may also give us some facility to do MS Hyperlapse type video and stereo 360 renderings, even though we won’t have a stereo rig.

We’ll also test some direct 360 stitching, as synthetic 360 views could be computationally expensive.

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Apparently we’ve been using this as a reference, I just didn’t know since I haven’t been doing the GPS side of things. :joy:

1 Like
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@StephaneP – If you want to participate, we’d be happy to do a video call intro.

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I’ll send you a pm

1 Like
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Hallo @StephaneP,
The IMX477 is in the Labpano Pilot Era and Pilot One 360 cameras. Their image quality however is bad. Seems something going wrong. Do you happen to know where I can find a software reference manual?

The Mapillary people have these cameras to test. Labpano has promised to implement a Mapillary app on the Pilots, but over the years I have learned to take their promises with a grain of salt.
The Pilots run on a fork of Android 7, there is SDK and apk’s can be loaded. Maybe that is of your interest.