Towards automatic colour segmentation for robot soccer

Tuning the colour thresholds within robot soccer is laborious, and sensitive to changes in illumination. An algorithm for automatic gain control and white balancing within the camera is described. This significantly reduces the effects of the variations in lighting on the thresholds. Next, a new colour space is proposed which maximises the hue separation of the different coloured regions to improve the colour discrimination. Finally several automatic segmentation techniques are briefly discussed. All of the algorithms are designed to operate on data directly streamed from the camera, enabling a low latency FPGA implementation.