Jim Carnicelli's AI Blog

[ Audio Version ] Recently, I completely forgot to mention that I published a brief introduction to machine vision (click here) on August 14th. It's meant to be tailored to people who want to better understand the subject but haven't had much experience outside the popular media's thin portrayal of it. By contrast, much of what's written that gets into the nuts and bolts is often difficult to read because it requires complex math skills or otherwise expects you to have a fairly strong background in the subject, already. I'm especially fond of demystifying subjects that look exceptionally complex. Machine vision often seems like a perfect example of pinheads making the world seem too complicated and their work more impressive than it really is. Sometimes it comes down to pure huckstery as cheap tricks and carefully groomed examples are employed in pursuit of funding or publicity. Then again, there's an awful lot of very good and creative work out there. It's

[ Audio Version ] I sometimes use my rickety platform here to review new technologies and web sites, but I haven't done enough to give kudos to the unusual people in AI that dot the world and sometimes find their way online. Bob Mottram is one such person that deserves mention. Who is Bob Mottram? He's a 33-ish year old British programmer who has found a keen interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He seems to be fairly well read on a variety of studies and technologies that are around. What starts to make him stand out is his active participation in the efforts. Like me, he finds that many of the documents out there that describe AI technologies sound tantalizingly detailed, but are actually very opaque when it comes to the details. Unlike most, however, he takes this simply as a challenge to surpass. He designs and codes and experiments until his results start to look like what is described in the literature. The next thing that sets Mottram apart is his willingne

[ Audio Version ] I've had some scraps of time here and there to put toward progress on my stereo vision experiments. My previous blog entry described how to calibrate a stereo camera pair to find X and Y offsets that correspond in the right camera with the same position in the left camera when they are both looking at a far off "infinity point". Once I had that, I knew it was only a small step to use the same basic algorithm for dynamically getting the two cameras "looking" at the same thing even when the subject matter is close enough for the two cameras to actually register a difference. And since I have the vertical offset already calculated, I was happy to see the algorithm running along this single horizontal "rail" runs faster. The next logical step, then, was to see if I could figure out the formula for telling how far away what the cameras are looking at is from the cameras. This is one of the core reasons for using a pair of cameras inste

[ Audio Version ] I'm currently working on developing a low-level stereo vision component tentatively called "Binoculus". It builds on the DualCameras component, which provides basic access to two attached cameras. To it, Binoculus already adds calibration and will hopefully add some basic ability to segment parts of the scene by perceived depth. For now, I've only worked on getting the images from the cameras to be calibrated so they both "point" in the same direction. The basic question here is: once the cameras point roughly in the same direction, how many horizontal and vertical pixels off is the left one from the right? I had previously pursued answering this using a somewhat complicated printed graphic and a somewhat annoying process, because I was expecting I would have to deal with spherical warping, differing camera sizes, differing colors, and so on. I've come to the conclusion that this probably won't be necessary, and that all that proba

[ Audio Version ] I have been getting more involved in stereo, or "binocular", vision research. So far, most of my actual development efforts have been on finding a pair of cameras that will work together on my computer, an annoying challenge, to be sure. Recently, I found a good pair, so I was able to move on to the next logical step: creating an API for dealing with two cameras. Using C#, I created a Windows control component that taps into the Windows Video Capture API and provides a very simple interface. Consumer code needs only start capturing, tell it to grab frames from time to time when it's ready, and eventually (optionally) to stop capturing. There's no question of synchronizing or worrying about a flood of events. I dubbed the component DualCameras and have made it freely available for download , including all source code and full documentation. I've already been using the component for a while now and have made some minor enhancements, but I'm ha