More Than Technical

Archive for the ‘video’ Category

Hi!
I’ve been working on implementing a face image relighting algorithm using spherical harmonics, one of the most elegant methods I’ve seen lately.
I start up by aligning a face model with OpenGL to automatically get the canonical face normals, which brushed up my knowledge of GLSL. Then I continue to estimating real faces “spharmonics”, and relighting.

Let’s start!
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Hi,
Just reporting on a small achievement, part of a big project: Creating a browser plugin to display the Kinect depth map on screen.
The integration was fairly easy, which leads me to think that both FireBreath and OpenNI/Nite are pretty neat framework that are robust..
So let’s see how it’s done
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Hi!

I would like to present something I have been working on recently, a work that immensely affect what I wrote in the blog in the past two years…

To use it:
Go on this page,
Watch the short instruction video,
download the application (MacOSX-Intel-x64 Win32)
and make yourself a model!
It takes just a couple of minutes and it’s very simple…

This work is an academic research project, Please please, take the time to fill out the survey! It is very short..
The results of the survey (the survey alone, no photos of your work) will possibly be published in an academic paper.

Note: No information is sent anywhere in any way outside of your machine (you may even unplug the network). All results are saved locally on your computer, and no inputs are recorded or transmitted. The application contains no malware. The source is available here.

Note II: All stock photos of models used in the application are released under Creative Commons By-NC-SA 2.0 license. Creator: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kk/. If you wish to distribute your results, they should also be released under a CC-By-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Thank you!
Roy.

Just wanted to share of some code I’ve been writing.
So I wanted to create a food classifier, for a cool project down in the Media Lab called FoodCam. It’s basically a camera that people put free food under, and they can send an email alert to the entire building to come eat (by pushing a huge button marked “Dinner Bell”). Really a cool thing.

OK let’s get down to business.
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I’ve seen some examples of people who build motion parallax capable screens using Kinect, but as usual – they don’t share the code. Too bad.
Well this is your chance to see how it’s done, and it’s fairly simple as well.
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I’m a fan of Last.fm online radio, and I have a habit of marking every good song that I hear as a “loved track”. Over the years I got quite a list, and so I decided to turn it into my jogging playlist. But for that, I need all the songs downloaded to my computer so I can put them on my mobile. While Last.fm does link to Amazon for downloading all the loved songs for pay, I’m going to walk the fine moral line here and suggest how you can download every song from existing free YouTube videos.
If it really bothers you, think of it as if I created a YouTube playlist and now I’m using my data plan to stream the songs off YT itself..
Moral issues resolved, we can move on to the scripting.
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I found a nice little trick to ease the work with the very noisy depth image the Kinect is giving out. The image is filled with these “blank” values that basically note where the data is unreadable. The secret is to use inpainting to cover these areas and get a cleaner image. And as always, no need to dig deep – OpenCV has it all included.
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My adventures of getting frame animation on the Android 2.1 continue, and take a turn for the worse. Will I come up victorious in the end? Not sure…

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Hi

I’d like to share a quick tip on rotating video files.

I’m always frustrated with taking videos with my phone. Single handedly it’s easiest to do it when the phone is upright and not in landscape mode. But the files are always saved in landscape mode, which makes them rotated when you watch.
Although there are plenty of GUI software to do it, using the command line is faster and can also be batched!

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Hi

Just wanted to share a thing I made – a simple 2D hand pose estimator, using a skeleton model fitting. Basically there has been a crap load of work on hand pose estimation, but I was inspired by this ancient work. The problem is setting out to find a good solution, and everything is very hard to understand and implement. In such cases I like to be inspired by a method, and just set out with my own implementation. This way, I understand whats going on, simplify it, and share it with you!

Anyway, let’s get down to business.
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