TargetTalk

Hello – I am thinking of developing a target camera system. I know there are several systems already on the market – but what, in your opinion, do these systems lack? What would you like to see? What features are important to you?

I appreciate the input! Thanks

If you want an immediate winner make one that you can set up by the bench and not have anything down range. Take the money saved on not needing WIFI and put it into the optics. Software - make it intuitive and customizable by the user, like being able to turn off or hide certain shots, or creating groups of shot's where you can put notations like sight adjustments or loading info. Analytics like group size, group center to center of target and of course center of shot to center of target.

- Dave

I think Dave really described the ideal system. The difficulty with a bench mounted system may be dealing with vibration though with the optical magnification required.

If one could have all the capabilities of a scoring app like Target Scan and a small optical sensor at the shooting position it would be a hot seller. The latest Scatt sensor (MX-01??) optically can do the job albeit at a very high price but maybe something along those lines.

You can tell I'm not an engineer or a software guy so I can't articulate this as well as Dave.

I'd like to take what I said a little bit further.

You would be able to store the selected group size from a session with the load info (powder, bullet, OAL etc..) along with date, temp, wind, rifle, etc..

If I shoot a group and the system gives me the distance of the group center to the target center, and the distance to target is known, then you would have the MOA adjustments needed to center the group on target. If the system also accepted the MOA per click of the sights it could give you the # of clicks needed to center the group. You could store the firearm info so it could be pulled up for another session, same for ammo/loads.

I agree mounting on the bench for the optic probably wouldn't work - unless it's concrete.

- Dave

ability to center, then score the group decimally, is top of my list.

Create a Git and get an open source project going!

Cheap off the shelf products would be great - perhaps a Raspberry Pi with a Pi Camera Module? OpenCV Library and Python could be used for the computer vision.

Application of OpenCV and Python for counting traffic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Cvn3_4yGo

OpenCV: http://programmingcomputervision.com/

The above text references PIL (Python Imaging Library) which is kind of dead now but Pillow is an offshoot of this:
https://python-pillow.github.io/
https://pillow.readthedocs.org/

Method:
Use the black ring of any target to get comparative size of target space. (Background Subtraction at this stage to get rid of stuff not the target)
Compare frames every second to notice a hole. (Frame Comparison)
When a bullet hole is spotted create a Cartesian coordinate within the target to give a decimal scoring in relation to the black.

The challenges are:

Creating a camera system that gets as close to square to the target without obstructing it. Perhaps use alloy runner sections like a camera slider on the cheap jacked up to level by means of trellises.

I have thought about this quite a bit, along with creating a Open Source range timer from off the shelf components to give cheap and accessible tools for fledgling clubs or for when the old timers eventually crap out.