CODEWITHSUNDEEP
esp32arduino-esp32
Steve Brown
Steve Brown

Reputation: 449

ESP32-CAM image noisy

I am using ESP32-CAM, and CameraWebServer example from standard Arduino IDE package. It works fine, but the image I receive in a browser is noisy: color lines appear randomly over the picture. Any idea what causes it and how to fix?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2878

Answers (1)

Junkyard Dog
Junkyard Dog

Reputation: 11

There could be a number of reasons for this behaviour, and it possibly down to a cumulative number of issues which will affect the picture quality.

  1. Power supply quality. ESP32's draw a lot of current under certain conditions, and this can cause a brownout condition to occur. This could be down to your USB port not being able to supply enough current. Check the serial terminal for messages, if you see brownout error messages on your serial monitor, try a powered USB hub or a better quality USB cable
  2. Power supply noise. If you have access to an oscilloscope, check the 3.3 and 5v rails for garbage. If excessive, try adding 2 x 1000uf capacitors on each rail
  3. RF interference. The ribbon cable between the camera and the board is not shielded. Try lifting it away from the board, or even wrapping it in a thin layer of foil and some insulating tape, ensuring no shorts occur. If the ribbon cable is long, try a camera with a shorter cable
  4. Lighting. With fluorescent and LED lighting, some forms of illumination seem noisier than others. Try increasingly natural daylight
  5. Interface settings. The defaults on the webserver example are not ideal for certain lighting conditions. Try disabling Lens correction and manually adjusting the gain control, AE level and exposure. Tweaking these settings will ellemminate much of the background noise.

I found all of these small improvements makes a big difference to picture quality. In my scenario, low light and noisy power seemed to be the worst culprits, but your YMMV. By implementing these I managed to improve the picture quality from unwatchable to reasonable.

Upvotes: 1

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