Algorithm design for a gun simulator based on image processing

In this paper, an algorithm is designed for shooting games under strong background light. Six LEDs are uniformly distributed on the edge of a game machine screen. They are located at the four corners and in the middle of the top and the bottom edges. Three LEDs are enlightened in the odd frames, and the other three are enlightened in the even frames. A simulator is furnished with one camera, which is used to obtain the image of the LEDs by applying inter-frame difference between the even and odd frames. In the resulting images, six LED are six bright spots. To obtain the LEDs’ coordinates rapidly, we proposed a method based on the area of the bright spots. After calibrating the camera based on a pinhole model, four equations can be found using the relationship between the image coordinate system and the world coordinate system with perspective transformation. The center point of the image of LEDs is supposed to be at the virtual shooting point. The perspective transformation matrix is applied to the coordinate of the center point. Then we can obtain the virtual shooting point’s coordinate in the world coordinate system. When a game player shoots a target about two meters away, using the method discussed in this paper, the calculated coordinate error is less than ten mm. We can obtain 65 coordinate results per second, which meets the requirement of a real-time system. It proves the algorithm is reliable and effective.