Our Agenda for B-Term:

Here's a " missing picture of a timeline" for B-Term!
  1. Initialization
  2. Ball Recognition
  3. Interface

Our current situation is:

    [11/03/97]
    We are currently working on porting our existing C code, written on the Unix boxes over the Visual C++ code for our NT box.  Right now we have some image manipulation classes set up for file I/O.  These classes are currently undergoing debugging.  Hopefully this code will be working by the end of the week so that we can move our primary development from Unix/C to NT/VC++.
    As far as ball recognition goes, we are working on edge detection in combination with plotting edges into N-B space in order to find table edges.  Another possibility is to use R-Theta space (polar coords) instead of N-B space, this would allow a little easier computations though how this works out for circular edges (balls) we don't know.  We are also experimenting with using HSV instead of RGB to differentiate between various table edges.
     We are also beginning the initial stages of the interface development.  Our major decision is what language to do the interface in.  Our two main options are Visual C++ or Visual Java (J++).  Since the back-end of our project will be in Visual C++, there are certain advantages to sticking with the same development language.. Speed, simple interaction between back-end and front-end.. and some other things I'm sure.  There are also several advantages of using J++ over VC++.  Namely its quite a bit simpler then Visual C++ in that we don't have to deal with the MicroSoft Foundation Classes, of course, we will most likely have to do this for our back-end anyway.  Using J++ will also most likely simplify the overall graphics design, namely window placement and usage of that window space will be easier in Java.