How to synchronise two CMOS Camera Modules for Stereo Vision

Let's Make Robots Robots
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It has been a while since my last posting on this topic. In the meantime I made significant progress as you can see here:There is now a PCB with all necessary stuff on it which for example completely alleviates all I2C chip configuration problems I had in the past with my first wire-connected protot

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/blog/show/how-to-synchronise-two-cmos-camera-modules-for-stereo-vision
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Nice work !

Will the general idea be to generate depth through horizontal disparity?  If so, what are you plans regarding matching?  Will you be using OpenCV or working on your own algorithms?

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This is my masterplan

This is my masterplan:

  1. Generate a Side-by-Side live Standard Definition video signal from separate signals of two camera modules at an appropriate pupillary distance.
  2. Transmit this signal with standard components from a robot/RC car/quadrocopter/etc. to my remote control.
  3. Feed the signal into the a Zeiss Cinemizer Plus or maybe the successor Cinemizer OLED.
  4. and enjoy stereo-vision from a remote positon.

My focus in this moment is rather not an autonomous robot with 3D-vision algorithms but to remotely control air or ground vehicles with stereo vision. If you consider RC airplanes or RC helicopters this is also known as First Person View (FPV), a quite common topic due to the availability of video goggles like this one. But to my knowledge none of them offers stereo vision. So I tried to build my own.

As the digital video signals (BT.601 and BT.656 standard) arrive at 27MHz I am forced to use an FPGA instead of e.g. a Parallax Propeller. The FPGA synchronizes the two video streams and rearranges them to build the side-by-side image configuration which the Cinemizer reads. It acts basically as a video stream filter - read two streams and make one out of them.