ECE 4760: Final Project

Human Tetris

Video Object Tracking

Adam Papamarcos (aip23@cornell.edu)

Kerran Flanagan (kaf42@cornell.edu)

"a real-time video object tracking / shape recognition device, and a fun game library to demonstrate its abilities"

project soundbyte

We have created a real-time video object tracking / shape recognition device, and a fun game library to demonstrate its abilities.

For our project, we wanted to push the video sampling and processing capabilities of the ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Using a high-speed analog-to-digital converter as an input device, we were able to sample a reasonably high-resolution grayscale image from a color camera's video output. Using this grayscale image, we are able to track objects and recognize shapes that stood out from the background by a customizable threshold.

We created a game called Human Tetris to show off the system's shape recognition capability. In this game, players must contort their bodies into shapes displayed on screen in a given amount of time. To demonstrate the potential for our device to expand to a larger game library, we also implemented a port of Brick Breaker and another ineractive game called Whack-a-Mole. Brick Breaker shows off the object tracking capability, where players must physically interact with the bouncing ball to keep it on screen and break bricks. Whack-a-Mole requires a player to flail around on the screen to hit all of the moles before they disappear.