Monday, November 30, 2009

Tiny projector for fun and for art

I definitively love this art stuff.

It's a nice use of camera with built-in  tiny projector.

The idea is cool and the show is very fun. The big tower real time performance show is neat !

Friday, November 27, 2009

C++ reference, C reference

How obtain a good overview of C and C++ native library. The response is simple search information on good website :

cplusplus Purpose an overview with sample of how use the C/STL functions.

http://cplusplus.com/reference/

You have excellent graph that show the dependencies of each STL module. A forum to ask question, It's pretty cool !

cppreference

This website cannot replace the first one but come in complement. You can see the references in your language if already people have contributed.. It's pretty nice.

Also you have a guide that come in complement to cplusplus.com you have a section General Topics that allow to cover the subjects: Pre-processor commands, Operator Precedence, Escape Sequences, ASCII Chart, Data Types,Keywords, Header Files.

So if you do not know what you can choose between use deque, vector, list, or use which algorithm to perform sort/find operation in array do not hesitate, take a look to this website. You will become a more effective programmer by using the good tools and the algorithm that fit the best the data. ( set container is very usefull after you know for what it is done !).



Thursday, November 26, 2009

ABB FLexPicker robots

ABB Flexpicker robot are fast and they allow to pick and move somethings in a pretty fast way.

By look at the following video we can see that a basic computer vision task allow to find the objetcs, and after with a queue algorithm the robots make a choice to move all the cakes in the boxes...

Pretty good.


US Air force build a PS3 cluster

The US Air Force have already a PS3 (old generation) computing cluster of 336 consoles. But they want extend it with up to 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing.

It seems that they perform some "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing'.


Source : link

Cell Processor spec : link

Friday, November 20, 2009

Sonnet for Lena

O dear Lena, your beauty is so vast
It is hard sometimes to describe it fast.
I thought the entire world I would impress
If only your portrait I could compress.
Alas! First when I tried to use VQ
I found that your cheeks belong to only you.
Your silky hair contains a thousand lines
Hard to match with sums of discrete cosines.
And for your lips, sensual and tactual
Thirteen Crays found not the proper fractal.
And while these setbacks are all quite severe
I might have fixed them with hacks here or there
But when filters took sparkle from your eyes

I said, "Heck with it. I'll just digitize."

.Thomas Colthurst.

Source : Here 

Sony plans for 3D support on PS3

Sony is now letting everyone know that the PlayStation 3 will factor into the company’s overall 3D television strategy. How, you might ask, is the PlayStation 3 going to factor into their 3D television strategy?

Well, with a firmware update, of course! All PlayStation 3 consoles will be firmware upgradeable to support 3D televisions in the future. Of course, no one is talking about the fact that besides needing a 3D television to hook your PlayStation 3 to, you also need software content to take advantage of the technology.

The news that Sony is planning 3D support for the PlayStation 3 is an interesting development.

Source FudZilla

My opinion : It will be hard to Sony to support all 3D television, because if they want use auto-stereoscopic display they have many one with different capacity (in term of the number of viewpoint displayed and the user must be at a given distance to see it correctly... it impose to the user to have a correct setup to have the best result...) So, Wait and see !!

Or another possibility is that they will sell 3D glasses (red/green, electronic shutter...)

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Google Image Swirl, keywords based image clustering

Google have launch a new service. A web clustering exploration. The techno is based on keyword. All the image that share a similar keyword are linked. The interface is nice and powered by flash. But the keywords approach show rapidly is limit, the image do not share at all visual content (sometimes).

For exemple type Paris (you will find Paris hilton and Paris city photos....)

On the following experiment you see that I have typed 'Paris'. I have navigate through Paris Hilton clusters and finally I have found a architectural content... (From Paris city, Sainte Chapelle ).


So the approach is nice, but based on keywords seems to be very limited. But is allow to have a nice filtering of information.

Monday, November 16, 2009

CUDA Toolkit 3.0 beta released, now with public downloads

Nvidia have released to public the CUDA Toolkit 3.0.

I will not list all the Highlight.... they list because is too long.

But the most important point (related to image processing and OpenGL application are the following points) Support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195.39 beta driver:
Double Precision
OpenGL Interoperability, for interactive high performance visualization
OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering
32-bit Atomics for fast, convenient data manipulation
Byte Addressable Stores, for faster video/image processing and compression algorithms
Support for the latest OpenCL spec revision 48 and latest official Khronos OpenCL headers as of 11/1/2009

OpenCL Tutorials

AMD/ATI have a great page related to his "ATI Stream" tech. You can have access to "Developer Articles & Publications.

Notice that you have two tutorial on OPENCL.

Image convolution,

N-Body Simulation.

I'm quite impatient to test OpenCL for real.


Friday, November 13, 2009

Contour Tracing

In Image processing you have many ways to draw the contour of shapes. You can compute the contour yourself and display it (with morphologic contour (dilated shape - normal shape) ), but you can do it also with connectivity (by go along the edges of the shape).

The link here explain the different state of the art approach.



Octave/Matlab graphics Master

You will find here a powerful guide to make graphics/plot in octave matlab.

http://iste.epfl.ch/cours_matlab/graphiques.html

I know it's written in french, but a picture with universal source code is better than thousand words !

All the following list is explained :

Pie/Bar/Histogram/Stem//Plot/Polar/Meshgrid/Quiver (gradient field) / Slice (3d data).... 


Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Go for it ?



Google just introduced a new open-source programming language: Go. The language tag line is simple, fast, safe, concurrent, fun and open-source. Would you give it a try ?

Friday, November 6, 2009

3D points to continuous surface

Sparse information are often the result of computer science task because we have found robust information for only a part of the dataset. But we want to reconstruct a credible result that can represent the best the sampled data in front of the real data.

Interpolation is a good way to fill holes. We all know method like Bezier, Lagrange, B-Splines, Nurbs methods. But other method exist and I want mention them here :





Surface reconstruction algorithm gives us a much better feel for the data. There are Kriging that perform this task, but Kriging can be slower on large data sets. I purpose you to read the master thesis of Mike Thiesen. A FAST LAYERED ALTERNATIVE TO KRIGING.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Go ahead, make something Unreal. Free Unreal Dev Kit

What : UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.

Who's it for  : Anyone. Everyone. You. Unreal Engine 3 has been used by game developers, researchers, television studios, machinima directors, artists and students. If you have an idea that needs to be brought to life in a game engine, UDK is for you.

Why : Sample are provided, it's free for not commercial use. (Make your levels for free and test them).

Make concept game with your team on a very good engine. I just want to add : "You are The next-gen".

You must take a look to Feature, and Showcase webpages.



A breast implant simulator

You do not dream, a french company called NEUROSYSTEMS created a software called Simplant that is able to simulate breast enlargment in 3D.

You can see here some video of the simulated torso (here).

My regret, is that the torso is not modelized from photos but from measurement of the studied body.