First we gather a data set of all the hand-shapes we wish to recognise. A naive approach to recognizing a new image D would be to simply compare it with all the images stored in the data set and find the target image T with the closest match. But because there are so many images in the data set this will take far too long. We can reduce the time by using a multi-scale approach. We divide up the data set into groups of images, which are similar to one another by blurring the images at different levels so that small differences between similar images will be eroded.

More information please refer here http://www.ercim.eu/publication/Ercim_News/enw46/shamaie.html

About openCV

A library of programming functions for real time computer vision,released under a BSD?license, and free for academic and commercial use (a). Current version is openCV 2.1, this version has been installed and compiled under my VS 2008 environment but with some errors, may not be very easy to configure this version. While the stabilities of openCV 1.0 have been firmly proved already and that is easier to install and configure. Install guides can be found as ?openCV install guide in openCV wiki,?installing openCV in windows, vc2008 install openCV 2.0/2.1(in Chinese)?and get started with openCV.

A easy start of ‘hello world‘ application using openCV can be very helpful. Under most occasions, openCV is used within windows console applications with a black command window and openCV’s own interfaces (highgui) to display images and draw patterns, as the ‘hello world’ example shows. As well there are some other interface components included in openCV library such as sliders, mouse movement events and key input events. Using these provided features of openCV, object detection could be done via capturing webcam images, analysing them and finally output the consequences.

One recommendation of learning openCV online is Yahoo openCV group. It is a group with huge number of active members posting hundreds of messages each day, may be a little massive, but a good place to raise questions and meet other people, highly recommended.

About detections & recognitions

Detections are core functions of openCV. Color knobs, objects, motions, gestures and faces are subjects of openCV detections and recognitions.

Color knob detections

detecting colors using openCV is basic, there could be several ways to achieve the color detections. For instance, as the color detection used in my hand recognition project, the target color is divided into three perspectives of H, B, and V. By combining these parameters, theoretically it is available to detect any color. But the fault of HSV method is that the background colours are usually too sensitive to be specified. So does another method which uses simple brightness threshold to get target colours, but it is limited as well. A better way of detecting a range of colours is to use ‘camshift’ which requires a source image which represents colour information for target colours. There is an example of using ‘camshift’ here.

Object detections

Object detection is kind of similar as colour extraction since to recognise the objects they should be detected first. Here is an example of using Actionscript 3.0 to tracking objects via webcam. In openCV it is simple as well. Tracking the objects, then using circle or line detection methods to extract rough object shapes. It could be very accurate of detecting object angles which are demonstrated here, and another object detection example illustration here. Detecting an array of object is nearly the same as detecting solo object, except some extra work is needed to loop all objects at one time and draw them out, this could be seem here as detecting combined objects.

Motion detections

There is an example of motion detections in openCV’s example folders, which is called motemlp.exe and a source file motempl.c. The picture on the left shows the motion directions and sub components’ directions are being marked clearly.

Gesture and face detections
Face detections are maturely applied in digital cameras presently. It is dependant on haar trainings and classifiers therefore the detection results seem robust. As well, a face detection example with source code can be found in openCV’s example folder. In this review face detection would not be emphasised too much as there are millions of tutorials telling how to detect the face in either static or dynamic circumstances.

Recognitions of hand gestures is the challenging part.  On current stage, hand gestures especially finger tips are still tough due to the natural shapes of hands are ambiguous for computer to identify which is which. Therefore some simple and intuitive gestures are commonly adopted to relatively improve the accuracy of recognitions. Recognition gestures requires two factors: a. correct contours and b. predefined gesture patterns. The first factor is reachable but the second requires more work to cheer up. Concerning the second factor, there have been some theoretical papers raising solutions of detecting hand gestures. Toughly, putting these theoretical methods into practical use and generate kind of applications providing open source codes still has long way to go. A progressive project can be referred here as hand detection and image descriptions.

Useful toolkits

HandVu

ARToolkit

I have experienced that and that was awful. Therefore i decide to share these solutions by providing functional codes as below. The solution is easy, after adding new media player relevant classes then, using codes below to replace those generated automatically by system. The key part of the change is from ‘public:CWND’ to ‘public:COleDispatchDriver’.

CWMPControls.cpp

CWMPControls.h

CWMPMedia.cpp

CWMPMedia.h

CWMPPlaylist.cpp

CWMPPlaylist.h

CWMPSettings.cpp

CWMPSettings.h

ocx1.cpp

ocx1.h

Step 1: Visual C++ wizard, choose MFC App.

Step 2: Visual C++, choose single document, to create main MFC app frame.

Step 3: Add openCV libs in project properties.

Step 4: Add variables in Doc class: add a variable m_image, include highgui.h head file in the first beginning, and the variable CImage   m_image.

Step 5: Add two virtual functions to open and save image file, as shown below.

Step 6: Add codes in View class to show the image

Step 7: Compile the app, then an image can be open through open menu, here comes the beauty Lena.

—

There are several vital parameters in using the function cvsnakeimage, particularly parameters relating to curve energy which concerns judgements of finger tips. E.g.

A copy of full source code of demonstrating the use of the function could be found here cvSnakeImage for hand detection

secret powers from Mechanics of Destruction on Vimeo.

Relevant posts & comments please refer to  ‘Hand gesture detection and recognition using openCV’， and related comments here.

—Some thoughts of <An Education>

Iceland people joke themselves as ‘disaster exporters’ while after last bankruptcies it follows volcano eruption which involves the whole Europe and is known world widely.

Millions of people are stranded in Europe, and its negative waves continue, types of vegetables like mushrooms and tomatoes in Huddersfield’s Sainsbury are almost  in short now.

I’d better get some canned food just in case. ..

It is but a photograph of a rail station in Huddersfield.

A full paper about this can be found here titled as ‘tracking a hand manipulating objects‘

As described by the authors, a method of individual local tracker is used to achieve extractions. To achieve the goal as the left picture shows, it is required to build a 3-dimensional frame to skip the covering of objects and overlapped parts of hands. Seems the authors do not narrowly focus on color image segmentation which has been commonly adopted by computer vision researchers, but they integrate an estimation of features as well as 2.5-dimensional maps. That means probably extra dimension may required. In previous posts, we have successfully located contours of hands yet the shape recognition is still under investigation. And this new method may inspire us something further in hands tracking and recognition.

A great bar called ‘The Moorlands’, we had buffet lunch there and the atmosphere in the bar is really good, classical Yorkshire country. Scratching a car while we were leaving, sorry we just ran away.

The sky there was charming, with huge number of pieces of clouds in clearly blue background, that’s lovely. Looking up the glide planes flew freely just above peaks, jealous.

Leaving the peak zone, we went to Chatsworth. Pictures blow show a piece of iceberg of  deluxe Britain noble life. Paintings, sculptures, and numerous exhibitions fill the rooms, incredibly…

And finally, a picture of my standing on the top of a hill, though it was chilly and windy i was the first arriving.

When i was young i used to watch cars, tractors and boats going and coming everywhere, that is still in my memories. What attracted me so much was the wondering of where were these vehicles going and what were they doing.

Even today i can still image  scenes of my childhood as a little boy watching these vehicles until them gradually disappearing in far distance. And another strange habit which still remains is the preferences of smelling exhaust gas, not the gasoline’s but the diesel oil’s. Today when i saw the boat cruising in the narrow canal and sensed the smells, again i was wondering where it was going…

When i told friends that i had been UK for sixty weeks already i was often asked how could i calculate weeks staying. Even further if my further explanations are lacked, probably i would be misunderstood that the days in UK must be very tough due to the behaviour ‘calculation of weeks’ seems days being either idle or difficult for me.

I have no idea how should i provide them an appropriate explanation of my research life. Superficially it is a little boring and repeating, but indeed, it is challenging, exciting and enjoyable.

Linking DLLs:

• To permanantly include necessary dll files, add “C:\Program Files\OpenCV\bin” to PATH by visiting Advanced tab in System of Windows (the locate of directory might be different).
• One can just copy necessary dll files into project directory with source files.
• It might be required to restart Visual C++ when execution of instance failes after successful build.

Customize Global Options:

• Open the Visual C++ .Net Application. In the menu bar, select Tools->Options
• In the listing, choose Projects->VC++ Directories.
• First, select Library files from the “Show Directories for” List Box.
• Click the Insert New icon, and locate the folder where you have installed opencv.
• Consider that it is installed in “C:/Program Files/OpenCV”.
• In the Library files list, locate and add:

“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib”

• Now choose Include files in the list box, and locate and add the following directories:

“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cv\include”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cxcore\include”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\otherlibs\highgui”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cvaux\include”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\otherlibs\_graphics\include”

• Next, choose source files in the list box, and locate and add the following directories:

“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cv\src”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cxcore\src”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cvaux\src”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\otherlibs\highgui”
“C:\Program Files\OpenCV\otherlibs\_graphics\src”

• Now click OK in the Options dialog.
• You have successfully configured the global settings.

Create New Project:

• Within Developer Studio create new application:
• Select from menu “File”->”New…”->”Projects” tab.
• Choose “Win32 Application” or “Win32 console application” – the latter is the easier variant and both the sample projects have this type.

• Type the project name and choose location
• Click Ok.. In the Application Wizard, Just click Finish.

• After the above steps done Developer Studio will create the project folder (by default it has the same name as the project), <project name>.vcproj file, Solution <project name>.sln and, Three Source files: <project name>.cpp, stdafx.cpp and stdafx.h. StdAfx files are precompiled header files, which can be very useful if you want to reduce the compilation time.
• For example, consider that we have created a new “Hello” Project. Open the Hello.cpp file, and include the OpenCV-related #include directives:

#include <cv.h>
#include <cxcore.h>
#include <highgui.h>

• Note that these should be included after stdafx.h or you may get build errors.
• Now Type some OpenCV code, and Build the Solution by pressing the F7 Key. There should be linker errors.
• Add dependency projects into workspace
• Choose from menu: “Project” -> “Properties”.
• Choose “Linker” tab -> “Input” category -> “Additional Dependencies:”. Add the paths to all necessary import libraries (cxcore[d].lib cv[d].lib highgui[d].lib cvaux[d].lib cvcam[d].lib)
  • Note: The debug versions are available only when you Build the Visual C++ .NET solution provided with the OpenCV installation.

• If the build process complains about a missing ‘windows.h’ header file, then you’ll need to install the latest version of the Microsoft Windows SDK.
• . That’s it!.. Now Build and Run the application using F5 key and enjoy OpenCV!

.

Post quoted from: openCV Wiki, all copyrights reserved by original authors.

I’m using OpenCV for some tests, and for some reasons (freelance gigs and Symbian SDK) using MS Visual Studio. As new and shiny OpenCV 2.0 is out I decided to switch to it. As it happen, one absolutely have to read buried in the download section readme, before doing anything.
The thing is, OpenCV 2.0 doesn’t include lib files for VS. They have to be built by user.
So here is step by step retelling of readme:
1. Rename your old OpenCV installation to save it, just in case
2. Download and install OpenCV 2.0a
3. Download and install CMake
4. Reboot (or CMake wouldn’t work)
5. Go to C:\Program Files\CMake 2.6\bin and run cmake-gui.exe
6. In the “Where is the source code” field choose your new OpenCV directory (C:\OpenCV)
In “Where to build the binaries” choose directory for VS compiled OpneCV (C:\OpenCV\VS2005)
7. press Configure button and choose VS2005 (or whatever) as building enviroment
8. Press Generate and VS project will be generated in the C:\OpenCV\VS2005
9. Launch solution and build it. For debug build some projects require debug python libraries. As riseriyo pointed in comments if you have Python installed other than 2.6 that can cause problem.
10. Copy *.lib from C:\OpenCV\vs2005\lib\release (or debug) to C:\OpenCV\lib
Copy *.dll from C:\OpenCV\vs2005\bin\release to C:\OpenCV\bin
11. Now, reconfigure your application project. Include directories now “C:\OpenCV\include\opencv” instead of “C:\OpenCV\include
12. All libraries renamed from *.lib to *200.lib (cv.lib to cv200.lib) or *200d.lib for debug. Rename them, or change project settings.

The post was posted originally in ‘Mirror Image‘, all copyrights reserved by original authors.

I was told the origin of the Easter by my supervisor though i have been knowing that for quite long. Anyway it is good to have holidays like that.

Happy Easter!

I have been interested in playing badminton for years, because surprisingly i did not get many chances to play and practice that. But funny enough we start playing badminton in office recently though it is officially not allowed. Fortunately even in such small space in the office i am having the fun of being relax. Thank you guys with whom i play badminton, definitely we need to apply a space for entertainments, and going out of the deadly boring office.

Another thing, i am going to learn swimming this summer. A good teacher has been invited who promises that i will never ever be drawn during learning. That makes me confident.

Here we go…

Days ago i saw a post talking about ‘paging wordpress posts without using plug-ins‘ like pagenav. The way to integrate such codes into themes is easy, but with a little bug. 
First put this paging function in the theme’s functions.php

function kriesi_pagination($query_string){
global $posts_per_page, $paged;
$my_query = new WP_Query($query_string .”&posts_per_page=-1″);
$total_posts = $my_query->post_count;
if(empty($paged))$paged = 1;
$prev = $paged – 1;
$next = $paged + 1;
$range = 2; // only edit this if you want to show more page-links
$showitems = ($range * 2)+1;

$pages = ceil($total_posts/$posts_per_page);
if(1 != $pages){
echo “<div class=’pagination’>”;
echo ($paged > 2 && $paged+$range+1 > $pages && $showitems < $pages)? “<a href=’”.get_pagenum_link(1).”‘>最前</a>”:”";
echo ($paged > 1 && $showitems < $pages)? “<a href=’”.get_pagenum_link($prev).”‘>上一页</a>”:”";

for ($i=1; $i <= $pages; $i++){
if (1 != $pages &&( !($i >= $paged+$range+1 || $i <= $paged-$range-1) || $pages <= $showitems )){
echo ($paged == $i)? “<span class=’current’>”.$i.”</span>”:”<a href=’”.get_pagenum_link($i).”‘ class=’inactive’ >”.$i.”</a>”;
}
}

echo ($paged < $pages && $showitems < $pages) ? “<a href=’”.get_pagenum_link($next).”‘>下一页</a>” :”";
echo ($paged < $pages-1 && $paged+$range-1 < $pages && $showitems < $pages) ? “<a href=’”.get_pagenum_link($pages).”‘>最后</a>”:”";
echo “</div>n”;
}
}

Then put this reference code in the place where page navigation is needed to show.

<?php kriesi_pagination($query_string); ?>

And finally add some styles in the theme’s style.css file.

.pagination{
line-height:23px;
}
.pagination span, .pagination a{
font-size:12px;
margin: 2px 6px 2px 0;
background:#fff;
border:1px solid #e5e5e5;
color:#787878;
padding:2px 5px 2px 5px;
text-decoration:none;
}
.pagination a:hover{
background: #8391A7;
border:1px solid #fff;
color:#fff;
}
.pagination .current{
background: #fff;
border:1px solid #8d8d8d;
color:#393939;
font-size:12px;
padding:2px 5px 2px 5px;
}

Here comes a problem. When that is put in a new page to navigate posts, it does not work. And after carefully checking, the problem gets located in the function calling where the  ’query_string’ is used. If it is going to be used in a page with its ID equals 99, then the ‘query_string’ should be like this:

kriesi_pagination(“cat=99″);

or else, the page navigation would not show up due to the post number is zero.

As far as in my mind, there are three approaches that people have taken to detect hands using openCV, though not all of them have been tested by myself (a little shame). One is to use accurate HAAR-classifiers to locate and detect gestures which is considered as quite stable way but costing very much. Another is to use adaptive skin detection algorithms combined with motion analysis which seems easier to do than previous one. And the last is to use human skin colour segmentation to detect the contours of hands combined with hand convexity detection to recognise hands’ gestures [please refer to: hand gesture recognition using openCV].

HAAR-classifier database is rarely provided with open source projects. But we found some helpful papers which may give some thoughts of classifier training and test.

About hands database:

A colour hand gesture database for evaluating and improving algorithms on hand gesture and posture recognition

Application of classifiers:

Real-time hand tracking using a set of cooperative classifiers based on HAAR-like features

Alternative skin detection based approach gesture recognition through angle space:

Gesture recognition through angle space

As these are mostly asked questions about using openCV to detect and recognise all kinds of subjects such as colours or hands, a review which includes tutorials, progresses and examples (if possible) would be published shortly…

It is not a movie about love and wedding though it begins and ends there, it is about courage, the courage between the dream and the realism, the courage which is also needed even in the dream. Poking arms and waking up from the dream seems not so usable sometimes rather, taking the sword and facing the challenge would be the best choice for Alice.

I do think the movie trying to tell  a truth that, some things are destined, but even destinations need believes, insisting and courage.

There is an exception of myself to predict where love story movies going to, don’t know why, maybe because don’t know how. It is about love and life, realism and dream, girls and boys, but not right or wrong.

“Don’t worry about me, i am not alone here…”

St. Paul’s hall in sunset.

St. Paul’s hall, taken on my way home.

The sunset scence puts more mysteries on the hall taper.

On my way home, the St. Paul’s hall in Huddersfield.

Happy lunar new year of tiger!!!

Can you imagine the sky rains hamburgs? Here it is, the “cloudy with a chance of meatballs” which presents a vivid story about a young crazy scientist invents a rocket which is able to turn water into food. Be careful of raining meatballs or steaks.

At one time I was asked by Lesley how many films had i watched that, i could tell stories predictably, here my answer is just as average or, even less. Then i know, there needs some strong explanations to address such confusion. The reasons include being familiar to history and its sense of worth, the trail of screenwriters’ thoughts and some knowledge of commercial movie’s publication. No complicated logic is needed.

Clues in movies are subtle and invisible but not undiscovered, they just lay behind scenes which are quite possible to be ignored by audiences. Yes you can say my observation is sharp. However that is not the full answer, the other is thinking. I feel like watching movies very much not because i am presented fun, rather, i feel movies extend my life from single person to multiple dimensions, e.g. being bad guys, falling into love with someone and kind of revenge. I am able to continually experience all kinds of lives unless i quit watching movies. And my life becomes longer in another sense. Besides these experiences present me new feelings, they inspired my mind and equip my insights.

I wish i just made a clear explanation. What extra i’d like to mention here is, movies are movies, and life is still life.

The dramatic contrast between big cities and small villages in China has been witnessed all along my way home. When i was in Shanghai, its modern architectures impressed me very much though i do not feel like them as expected. However these high and low buildings can not be found any warmness but naked commercial competition atmosphere. They appear brand new but no stories behind, neither tenderness as i can find in vast villages in UK. My question is, would that be an ideal place as home for residence in the future ?

Conclusively there are two ways of objects recognition, which are

• combining simple shapes’ recognition to detect complicated objects;
• using pre-trained data to match objects if they are as set.

The ways we used to detect circles and lines by openCV belong to the first category, and training needed recognition ways such as faces detection and hands detection belong to the second category. Recognition can be quite stable after good data training, but it may not recognize other features without pre-defined, so does the rules of faces detection with openCV.

But if recognition is used to design other applications such as objects controlling or multi-touch demonstrations, it could not be better choice adopting training way to set up recognition functionalities. As the picture shown above, i abstract the recognition part from ARtoolkit which is a popular open source library in internet. The training and recognition test results shows that  it can recognize nearly all the patterns pre-trained.

Quite much work has been doing to improve accuracy of pattern recognition, to enable computer applications being sufficiently intelligent facing this dynamic world. ARtoolkit is one of them. By training computers to recognize patterns as shown above, i have opportunities to shift my attention from recognition to applications, which means, representation forms of recognition affect interaction.

By extracting recognition codes from ARtoolkit, it seems easier to train a computer to recognize patterns like letters and other graphics, and its recognizing results seem pretty good. Based on that, creating appropriate applications become urgent.

The reason of that shortage is due to the lacking of appropriate algorithms. In AS3 objects can not be respectively recognized through colors or shapes before. Fortunately through combination of some kinds of image processing functions, we could still be able to find out the exact way of representing objects under webcam, just as processed images shown below.

This progress provides AS3 more potential to build up interactive prototypes through webcam and normal surfaces with kind of semantic objects laid on. Thus the AS3′s abilities of building up flexible interfaces may be well used in afterward works.

Snowed again from andol on Vimeo.

Surprisingly it snowed again in the second day of new 2010.

While i was watching 3D ‘avatar’ in cinema, i never had such strong feelings that i hope human beings failed, in all their invasive missions on purpose. Or after we failed the earth, we would get revenge as well.

Merry Christmas!

One very interesting aspect of human-computer interaction is methodologies and their effectiveness. There is a view bore in my mind that until interaction became invisibly natural, then interaction did its job. Comparing to thousand years’ history of human lives, computer interaction faces its challenge to integrate itself into natural lives.

We use object recognition to simulate original daily domestic interaction like reading mails and leaving notes. Once computers can recognize specific objects as different meanings relating to its huge stored information, we believe that would be a further step towards natural and efficient interaction.

From shallow to deep MFC.pdf

VC++.pdf

While i was starting MFC in visual studio 2008, i got a fatal error in debugging as below:

Your version of the windows SDK is earlier than 6.0. Try setting the ‘WINVER’ and ‘_win32_winnt’ definitions in your project to less than 0×0600.


I tried several ways to fix that issue while nothing happened, also i investigated the documents in internet by Google neither any helpful information was provided. There indeed existed a solution which was as blew:

stdafx.h- add these codes in the header
#ifndef WINVER                  // Specifies that the minimum required platform is Windows Vista.
#define WINVER 0×0500          // Win2k
#ifndef _WIN32_WINNT            // Specifies that the minimum required platform is Windows Vista.
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0×0500    // Win2k

While that solution did not make any differences. And i tried another way- to download the Windows Platform SDK and installed it, and the most important, update the including library files to at least version 6, then try it again, everything was done.

China’s 60th Anniversary national day – timelapse and slow motion – 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

This is a video clip which was made by Guardian.co.uk. Comparing with CCTV’s video recording, this video has a more interesting lens to watch the parade.

Just on my way home, i saw a squirrel looking for food in the litter. When he saw me he just ran away to the wood near the litter.

Today is Confucius’ birthday and 52 contries’ google logos have changed to Confucius’ birthday celebration. Never saw that before, it is exciting. The Chinese words in the logo mean that ‘a friend comes from far away, itn’t that a very happly thing?’ Yes, it is.

This is a picture i took on my way home while passing the woods near the civic center, the sunshine, and the trees made people so peaceful.

This is a screenshot of demonstration hands detection using the code hsv.cpp. Comparing with the old version within black background and green contours lines, this version actually is based on that. Besides, two functions are added in this new version: using rectangle to locate the hands location, and using eslipe to illustrate the angle of hands motion.

hsv.cpp source code

Related post may interest you

Hand gesture detection and recognition using openCV

Some posts with prototype codes are occasionally requested to share the relevant codes. Due to this, i make a code collection in this post which could be convenient for all the readers. But please note that some codes still need additional image files or haar files that you should pay attention to.

haarFaceDetect
If you can not download the source code file, please refer to below
http://www.andol.info/download/haarFaceDetect.cpp

This is a prototype designed to test face detection using haar training algrithms. Needs image with faces and relevant haar trained xml file.

hsv
If you can not download the sourse code file, please refer to here below
http://www.andol.info/download/hsv.cpp
This is a prototype designed to detect hands ( not hands gesture ) in the dynamic motion images from web-cam. It uses color in a specific range to detect the hands, and then filters all the noises out to get the biggest contours of hands. Several backgrounds are tested by this codes.

HoughCircle
If you can not download the source code file, please refer to here below:
http://www.andol.info/download/HoughCircle.cpp
Static circle objects in the image are quite simple to grab. However, when it comes to combining recognition containing squares and circles, i have to admit that squares are easier to detect.

Andol in Cambridge from andol on Vimeo.

This is a short video of Cambridge tour. Admittedly, Cambridge is of a great place to dwelling.

Due to the previous domain “iandol.com” has been suspended in 13/07/2009, some of contens probably would not work perfectly. I am sorry to that and i will fix it soon.
–
Another bad news, i am indeed sorry that when i was trying to fix the problems above i replace all the post contents by mistake. Fortunately i recovered the data from a backup of 11/06/2009 although some posts got lost.

Thanks for your patient.

BBC has launched a new video channel in which some live webcams are capturing videoes of nature anamals, like swallow, greenfinch and kestrel all the lovely small animals. Through the online video player, we can watch the little birds waiting for being feed and playing in their nest.

This is the little swallows waiting for their parents back feeding them.

And, these are little greenfinchs, just playing in their nest happily.

The live broadcast is always online, but, i am not sure the users out of UK could be able to watch it, the address is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/springwatch/webcams/#2

Recently, it is being applied to consumer electronic products because companies consider it an important key to their success.

However, there is a difference in the concept of usability between the two applications. Unlike the software user interfaces, the image/impression felt by the users are as important as the performance for a consumer electronic product to be successful. ”

Sunny day, i, with my housemate went out for cycling along the huddersfield canal. It was planed a fantastic routine, unfortunately, the mile reader didn’t work firstly, closely after that, on a short up going bridge, another bicycle’s bearing was not able to afford the weight and it was brocken.

So, we have to change the plan from cycling to walking home. I took some photographs along the cycling way, have a look.

FOR THE MEMORY OF PR RECOVERY

While changing the domain name from andol.info to andol.info, i lost all the page rank datas which was reset to zero. After nearly 2 months’ waiting, finally, the page rank starts to recover. It is back !

As the post ‘10 videoes show some interesting AR applications‘ showed, integrating augmented reality technologies into interactive scenerial building is increasingly enhancing the experiences of interaction, both in the side of realastic world objects recognition and virtual applications.

These 2 pictures showed above are a demonstration of AR technology application with ARToolKit. Especially, i changed the default pattern for recognition and printed my own name on the card instead. After i trained the codes to recognize the new pattern, obviously, i got the satisfactory consequence. The codes recognized that new pattern rapidly and accurately, as well as using openGL to create practical coordinates and virtual 3D cube.

Although this isn’t the newest technology today, it indeed explored a new path to archive another advanced interaction method.

ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world. For example, in the image to the right a three-dimensional virtual character appears standing on a real card. It can be seen by the user in the head set display they are wearing. When the user moves the card, the virtual character moves with it and appears attached to the real object.

— artoolkit programe

And the video show blow, is an extension of artoolkit, worth having a look.

During the past days, i was trying to get the computer recognizing blue and red colors to archive my prototype application. I tested two methods to distinguish the colors recognition effects, that were value-fixed approach and value-dynamic approach. 

What i was doing is to build a simple, flexible and adaptable intellegent colors recognition prototype which could work under varities of spatial environments. First, a fixed value of color was set. Any colors match this value would be recognized as specific one. It is simple and easy, although it is dependentable on the environment light. ( if the environment is controlable, this method would be good one. ) Second approach is that, i devided the picture into 3 channels which are H, S, and V. And then, from H ( Hue), i defined a range of color as one color and other ranges for another. This experiment looks not so difficult and more robust that previous one, however, there’s still one thing which should be cautious: light temperature. Light tempreature changes, color’s hue exceeds.

So, before there invents more advantaged devices, recognizing which colors from which colors is relatively limited.

Well, after watching this clip, i have to admit that augmented reality has the potential of combining the advantages of both well-spatial virtual reality and spatial augmented reality. And, i don’t konw if you have noticed that, actually, the demonstration in the video was made by Actionscript which included pattern recognition and 3D display rendering.

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[Pictures from BBC.co.uk, all rights reserved by original authors]