3D Computer Vision for Software Developers
I teach developers how to make their apps see in 3D.
I have been watching Norman Wildberger’s videos on all things mathematics for about 10 years. To say that I have learned a lot is the understatement of the decade.
His most recent video is a recorded talk from July this year titled “How Chromogeometry transcends Klein’s Erlangen Program for Planar Geometries”. It is fascinating throughout but my interest was piqued when at 25:13 he starts talking about ellipses.
Continue reading “Diagonals of an ellipse”
I am building systems that can understand what they see. In this day and age, the necessary hardware is easily accessible since a digital camera and a computer can now be purchased for well under € 100. It is the software that is the real challenge.
Continue reading “Understanding events”
A major assumption in modern computer vision is that you have to track points on surfaces in order to see in 3D. You can use 2 images from 2 static cameras (“stereo”), or 2 images from 1 moving camera (“motion”). Continue reading “Solving correspondence”
One pleasant surprise for computer vision on a mobile device is that we can detect the 3D orientation of the camera from other sensors. An iPhone has an accelerometer and a gyroscope (among complementary sensors not discussed here). Continue reading “Internal inertial sensors”
What components do you need to get Augmented Reality (AR) technology running on your mobile phone? Continue reading “Mobile AR is a 3D revolution”
Our imagination is a powerful cognitive skill. When I walked into the living room of my new apartment, I experienced a rectangular empty space with a dusty concrete floor and hollow sounding acoustics. But in my mind I was already furnishing and decorating. I imagined a blue carpet on the floor, the walls lined with bookcases, a large table on the far end, and a comfortable couch near the window. Continue reading “Virtual furniture at the right scale”
I am right-eyed. A phenomenon also called “master eye” or “ocular dominance”.
So my left eye is the lazy one. And I don’t think it was properly treated when I was growing up. What I remember is that I saw double while reading: two images floating on top of each other. I could not fuse the two images into one “percept” of the book in front of me. I could accomplish that fusion easily for normal objects that were further away than the words on a page at arm’s length.
Continue reading “Upgrading vision system OVS-0”
Here is an interview that journalist Jim Jansen of the newspaper Het Parool had with me. He wanted to know how scientists spend their Summer holiday. It is in Dutch though, but I added a translation in English. Continue reading “Interview with newspaper “Het Parool””
There is presently a limited number of computer vision capabilities in Apple’s impressive technology stack. The main one that comes to mind is the face detection functionality. You can use it in the Camera app on your iDevice and in the Photos app on your Mac.
When I teach my workshop on 3D vision, the students also play with a 3D graphics framework called Scene Kit. It is very powerful and easy to use. With just a few lines of code they can create a vivid 3D scene. At some point in the tutorial, the student has created a scene with a red sphere on a grey shiny floor against a deep blue sky. Then they start playing with the controls, changing the distance, rotating the scene, or panning to the side. Invariably someone pushed the sphere to one of the corners of the image and then checks with me whether there is a mistake in the code. Continue reading “Spheres in perspective”
