Is there a way to use Kinect and OpenCV to determine whether the environment is bright or dark?

Question

I'm new to OpenCV and computer vision stuff. We are having a robot project with ROS and Kinect. We want to evaluate whether the room has adequate lighting using Kinect. Is there a way to use OpenCV to process the Kinect camera information and evaluate the environment?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

OpenCV has methods for connecting up with the Kinect, so yes, you would be able to pull the Kinect RGB image from the device.

As for determining your lighting conditions, I believe the Kinect has an auto-gain function built into it. In a very dark environment, that auto gain is going to cause a large amount of noise. So if you do some experiments in dark and light environments, measure the noise in the imagery you might be able to tell if the image (and consequently environment) is too dark from the image noise.

Answer 2

You could look for differences in two images, one where you shine a light, and one where you don't. I imagine that the change will be minimal in a bright environment, but there will be big difference in a dark one.

You'd have to elaborate on what would be "adequate lighting" for this to be more than a binary result.