How do I detect small blobs using EmguCV?

Question

I'm trying to track the position of a robot from an overhead webcam. However, as I don't have much access to the robot or the environment, so I have been working with snapshots from the webcam.
The robot has 5 bright LEDs positioned strategically which are a different enough color from the robot and the environment so as to easily isolate.
I have been able to do just that using EmguCV, resulting in a binary image like the one below. My question is now, how to I get the positions of the five blobs and use those positions to determine the position and orientation of the robot?

I have been experimenting with the Emgu.CV.VideoSurveillance.BlobTrackerAuto class, but it stubbornly refuses to detect the blobs in the above image. Being a bit of a newbie when it comes to any of this, I'm not sure what I could be doing wrong.
So what would be the best method of obtaining the positions of the blobs in the above image?

Answer 1

I can't tell you how to do it with emgucv in particular, you'd need to translate the calls from opencv to emgucv. You'd use cv::findContours to get the blobs and cv::moments to get the position of the blobs (the formula to get the middle points of the blobs is in the documentation of cv::moments). Then you'd use cv::estimateRigidTransform to get the position and orientation of the robot.

Answer 2

I use cvBlob library to work blobs. Yesterday i worked with it to detect small blobs and works fine.

Answer 3

I wrote a python module to do this very thing.

http://letsmakerobots.com/node/38883#comments