Monday, September 13, 2010

Quicksee acquired by Google

"Google is buying Israeli startup Quicksee, also known as MentorWave Technologies, for an estimated $10 million, reports Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The startup has raised $3 million from Ofer Hi-Tech and Doctor International Management."



"Quicksee makes 3D video tour software that can be pinned on a Google Map. It results in an effect similar to what you can see in Street View on Google Maps, allowing the viewer to pan around and see a panoramic image of a location. Except that the panoramic images do not require expensive 3D cameras mounted on top of a Google vehicle. Anybody can create one with a regular video camera and Quicksee software.

 

Google has not confirmed the acquisition or what it plans on doing with the team and technology, so this is just speculation. But the technology could allow Google Maps to accept geo-tagged, 3D panoramas uploaded by consumers. If you think Street View, which is shot by Google employees, creates new issues of privacy on the Internet, wait until consumers start uploading their own street views or who knows what else. Although 3D views inside buildings could be a nifty new feature for Google Places allows businesses to self-upload."

Source : TechCrunch QuickSee 

Friday, September 10, 2010

Real-time O(1) Bilateral Filtering

This paper comes from CVRP09



Real-time O(1) Bilateral Filtering
We propose a new bilateral filtering algorithm with computational complexity invariant to filter kernel size, so calledO(1) or constant time in the literature. By showing that a bilateral filter can be decomposed into a number of constant time spatial filters, our method yields a new class of constant time bilateral filters that can have arbitrary spatial1 and arbitrary range kernels. In contrast, the current available constant time algorithm requires the use of specific spatial or specific range kernels. Also, our algorithml ends itself to a parallel implementation leading to the first real-time O(1) algorithm that we know of. Meanwhile, our algorithm yields higher quality results since we are effectively quantizing the range function instead of quantizing both the range function and the input image. Empirical experiments show that our algorithm not only gives higher PSNR, but is about 10× faster than the state-of-the-art. It also has a small memory footprint, needed only 2% of the memory required by the state-of-the-art for obtaining thes ame quality as exact using 8-bit images. We also show that our algorithm can be easily extended for O(1) median filtering. Our bilateral filtering algorithm was tested in a number of applications, including HD video conferencing,video abstraction, highlight removal, and multi-focus imaging.

Qingxiong Yang, Kar-Han Tan and Narendra Ahuja, Real-time O(1) Bilateral Filtering, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2009. [PDF [Poster | Video Demo1, Video Demo2 | Code (cpu) (at submission) (updated) (updated, with spatial quantization) | ]

A multiplatform alternative to GLUT

PEZ is a Teeny Tiny GLUT Alternative



Pez enables cross-platform development of extremely simple OpenGL apps. It’s not really a library since it’s so small. Instead of linking it in, just by using one or two header files into your project.

This tutorial is compound of the following section :

Tutorial 1: Simplest Possible Example
Tutorial 2: Hello Triangle
Tutorial 3: Ghandi Texture
Tutorial 4: Mesh Viewer

The cons I see for the moment is that Pez doesn't handle keyboard stuff and resizable windows but it provide a sufficient environment for demos ! and tutorials.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Try glasses with Augmented Reality

"Atol unveiled a new web-based experience offering people to try latest glasses collection “AK Adriana Karembeu”. This augmented reality experience uses Total Immersion D’Fusion@Home and face tracking technology."

The only major problem of such things is that people that need glasses to see things... could not see their head clearly (so it's fashion application product)... An augmented reality that could delete your old glasses and replace them by a new model could be really cool and useful. 




The demo works fine, but the soft could loose the head tracking and so cumulate error and do not be able to set the glasses to the good position over your head. The rendering look a little bit plastic, but the soft could not estimate a environment map by using only the face...

Here the result of my personal tests :

Here we could see that the tracking is lost !

Source : here and here

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Crytek adds Stereoscopic 3D support to CryENGINE 3

Crytek announce that the CryEngine 3 support stereoscopic display with a very small overhead through the CryENGINE 3 Screen Space Re-Projection Stereo (SSRS) solution.



Source : CryEngine press release

CMake tips

CMake is a cool tool to perform cross-platform system for build automation. But sometime you want a better control through the command line. For example you are on a linux 64 bit machine and by default you will compile 64 bits binaries. So if you want to compile 32 bits binaries on a 64 bits machine you have to use some parameters to configure CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS:

How to control compiler flags :

If you want to specify your own compiler flags, you can
Set environent variable CFLAGS, CXXFLAG

or
cmake . -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS= -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=

When providing own compiler flags, you might want to specify CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE as well.

 For example if you want to do release build for 32 bit on 64 bit Linux machine ,you do cmake -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-m32 --DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-m32


Additionally you could use the -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE keyword.

Tips found here

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Geometric Computer Vision courses

Here a course on geometric computer vision from Dr Marc Pollefeys



Course Objectives

After attending this course students should:
Understand the concepts that allow recovering 3D shape from images.
Have a good overview of the state of the art in geometric computer vision.
Be able to critically analyze and asses current research in the area
Implement components of a 3D photography system.



Course Topics
The course will cover the following topics a.o. camera model and calibration, single-view metrology, triangulation, epipolar and multi-view geometry, two-view and multi-view stereo, structured-light, feature tracking and matching, structure-from-motion, shape-from-silhouettes and 3D modeling and applications.



Target Audience
The target audience of this course are Master or PhD students, or advanced Bachelor students, that are interested in learning about geometric computer vision and related topics.

Panorama Tracking and Mapping on Mobile Phones



For the tech side :
http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/naturalfeature.php

Related paper :
Real-time Panoramic Mapping and Tracking on Mobile Phones


Online Creation of Panoramic Augmented Reality Annotations on Mobile Phones

Authors: Tobias Langlotz, Daniel Wagner, Alessandro Mulloni, Dieter Schmalstieg

Details:Accepted for IEEE Pervasive Computing

We present a novel approach for creating and exploring annotations in place using mobile phones. The system can be used in large-scale indoor and outdoor scenarios and offers an accurate mapping of the annotations to physical objects. The system uses a drift-free orientation tracking based on panoramic images, which can be initialized using data from a GPS sensor. Given the current position and view direction, we show how annotations can be accurately mapped to the correct objects, even in the case of varying user positions. Possible applications range from Augmented Reality browsers to pedestrian navigation.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Unreal Engine 3 on Ipad, Itouch, I

Epic Citadel is an application that showcases the technical capabilities of the Unreal Engine 3 on iOS devices like iPad and iPhone.

http://epicgames.com/technology/epic-citadel






It looks good !

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Kmeans a tutorial

Here you will find a short tutorial of the process of the KMean algorithm.


K-Means is a clustering algorithm. That means you can “group” points based on their neighbourhood. When a lot of points a near by, you mark them as one cluster. With K-means, you can find good center points for these clusters.

SIFT an illustrated tutorial

On the web we found a bunch of things... and sometimes interesting things.

http://www.aishack.in/2010/05/sift-scale-invariant-feature-transform/

Here a point per point study of the SIFT process. (I'm not agree with all the illustration, but the idea is here and could help people to understand the meaning of each process).

1. Constructing a scale space
2. LoG Approximation
3. Finding keypoints
4. Get rid of bad key points
5. Assigning an orientation to the keypoints
6. Generate SIFT features

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Popcode AR for mobile phone


"Popcode is what is known in the trade as a Markerless Augmented Reality platform. That means you can add additional content onto any image (providing it has enough texture). You do not need to print large black-and-white markers to be able to add Augmented Reality (AR) content to the world using Popcode." The product was realized by Extra Reality Ltd.



For the tech side :
The founder are Simon Taylor, Dr. Tom Drummond (The thesis supervisor of Simon) and Connell Gauld (Mobile platform coder expert).

=> They used Fast corder detector, HIPS matching.
I let you see the SDK !

And the demos :