"image processing" entries

Four short links: 8 January 2016

Four short links: 8 January 2016

Modern C, Colorizing Photos, Flashing Toy Drones, and Web + Native

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 8, 2016
  1. How to C in 2016 — straightforward recommendations for writing C if you have to.
  2. Using Deep Learning to Colorize Old Photos — comes with a trained TensorFlow model to play with.
  3. Open Source Firmware for Toy Drones — The Eachine H8 is a typical-looking mini-quadcopter of the kind that sell for under $20.[…] takes you through a step-by-step guide to re-flashing the device with a custom firmware to enable acrobatics, or simply to tweak the throttle-to-engine-speed mapping for the quad. (via DIY Drones)
  4. Mobile Web vs. Native Apps or Why You Want Both (Luke Wroblewski) — The Web is for audience reach and native apps are for rich experiences. Both are strategic. Both are valuable. So when it comes to mobile, it’s not Web vs. Native. It’s both. The graphs are impressive.
Four short links: 12 November 2015

Four short links: 12 November 2015

Capsule Robots, Magnifying Deviations, Maker Books, and DevOps Theory

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 12, 2015
  1. Pillforge — open source software and hardware for Medical capsule robots aka cm-size mechatronic devices designed to perform medical tasks inside the body. Open sourced by Vanderbilt’s research team.
  2. Deviation Magnification — sweet image processing from MIT. Shares a researcher with this even more crazy paper on amplifying inconsistencies in rows of things. Mind: blown.
  3. Maker Humble Bundle — DIY bundle, pay what you want, optionally contribute to MakerEd.
  4. The O-Ring Theory of DevOps (Adrian Colyer) — Small differences in quality (i.e, in how quickly and accurately you perform each stage of your DevOps pipeline) quickly compound to make very large differences between the performance of the best-in-class and the rest.
Four short links: 6 July 2015

Four short links: 6 July 2015

DeepDream, In-Flight WiFi, Computer Vision in Preservation, and Testing Distributed Systems

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 6, 2015
  1. DeepDream — the software that’s been giving the Internet acid-free trips.
  2. In-Flight WiFi Business — numbers and context for why some airlines (JetBlue) have fast free in-flight wifi while others (Delta) have pricey slow in-flight wifi. Four years ago ViaSat-1 went into geostationary orbit, putting all other broadband satellites to shame with 140 Gbps of total capacity. This is the Ka-band satellite that JetBlue’s fleet connects to, and while the airline has to share that bandwidth with homes across of North America that subscribe to ViaSat’s Excede residential broadband service, it faces no shortage of capacity. That’s why JetBlue is able to deliver 10-15 Mbps speeds to its passengers.
  3. British Library Digitising Newspapers (The Guardian) — as well as photogrammetry methods used in the Great Parchment Book project, Terras and colleagues are exploring the potential of a host of techniques, including multispectral imaging (MSI). Inks, pencil marks, and paper all reflect, absorb, or emit particular wavelengths of light, ranging from the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum, through the visible region and into the UV. By taking photographs using different light sources and filters, it is possible to generate a suite of images. “We get back this stack of about 40 images of the [document] and then we can use image-processing to try to see what is in [some of them] and not others,” Terras explains.
  4. Testing a Distributed System (ACM) — This article discusses general strategies for testing distributed systems as well as specific strategies for testing distributed data storage systems.
Four short links: 24 April 2014

Four short links: 24 April 2014

Image Depth, Stress and Burnout, Tribal Software, and Face Recognition

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 24, 2014
  1. Depthy — new Google Camera app lets you capture some depth information, stored in metadata in the image. Nifty effects become possible.
  2. Coping with Stress and Burnout: Explanatory Power of Different Coping Strategies (PLoSone)– interesting taxonomy of burnout (overload, lack of development, and neglect) found by clustering responses to surveys, which also showed key signs. (via Psychological Science)
  3. Why is StackOverflow So Negative of Late? — my current theory is that social activities (sites, events, etc.) are journeys for cohorts. Newcomers don’t get as much from it, and the original cohort don’t enjoy newcomers. Social sites tend to rock at first until They arrive and ruin it for all. cf Burning Man. Newcomers will have to start their own site/event, but if they never get critical mass of the A-grade people who joined the first wave, their own event may fail.
  4. Surpassing Human-Level Face Verification Performance on LFW with GaussianFace (arXiv) — For the first time, the human-level performance in face verification (97.53%) on LFW [the standard “hard” face recognition data set] is surpassed. (via Medium)
Four short links: 8 April 2014

Four short links: 8 April 2014

Our Robot Future, Embeddable Pi, Behavioural Economics Not Solved Problem, and Imagine Processing Language

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 8, 2014
  1. Next Five Years for Robots — plausible summary of the near future progression, taken from Helen Greiner’s DEMOlabs talk.
  2. Raspberry Pi Compute Module — a Raspberry Pi shrunk down to fit on a SODIMM with onboard memory, whose connectors you can customise for your own needs. (via Makezine)
  3. Behavioural Economics and Public Policy (Financial Times) — interesting how A/B trials revealed that implementations of Cialdini’s social proof didn’t test as well as non-social-proof persuasive techniques. More useful than something that claims to be the right answer is knowing when you’re closer to the right answer. (via Mind Hacks)
  4. Halide Language — open source programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.
Four short links: 27 March 2014

Four short links: 27 March 2014

Understanding Image Processing, Sharing Data, Fixing Bad Science, and Delightful Dashboard

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 27, 2014
  1. 2D Image Post-Processing Techniques and Algorithms (DIY Drones) — understanding how automated image matching and processing tools work means you can also get a better understanding how to shoot your images and what to prevent to get good matches.
  2. Scientists Need to Learn to Share — despite science’s reputation for rigor, sloppiness is a substantial problem in some fields. You’re much more likely to check your work and follow best data-handling practices when you know someone is going to run your code and parse your data.
  3. METRICS — Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. John Ioannidis has a posse: connecting researchers into weak science, running conferences, creating a “journal watch”, and engaging policy makers. (says The Economist)
  4. Grafana — elegant dashboard for graphite (the realtime data graphing engine).
Four short links: 22 November 2013

Four short links: 22 November 2013

GAFE MOOCs, Recommendations Considered Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Glitch Art Given, and Cool Visual Hack

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 22, 2013
  1. Google Educator MOOCs — online courses for teachers who use Google in their classrooms.
  2. Algorithms and Accountability — Thus, the appearance of an autocompletion suggestion during the search process might make people decide to search for this suggestion although they didn’t have the intention to. A recent paper by Baker and Potts (2013) consequently questions “the extent to which such algorithms inadvertently help to perpetuate negative stereotypes”. (via New Aesthetic Tumblr)
  3. Glitch Content Enters Public Domain — amazing contribution of content, not just “open sourcing” but using CC0 to give the public the maximum possible rights for reuse.
  4. Sprite Lamp — a tool to help game developers combine 2D art, such as digital painting or pixel art, with dynamic lighting. This is pretty darn cool. (via Greg Borenstein)
Four short links: 29 May 2012

Four short links: 29 May 2012

AR Theme Park, Digital Citizenship, Simulating Faces, and Reverse-Engineering Pixels

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 29, 2012
  1. South Korean Kinect+RFID Augmented Reality Theme Park — Sixty-five attractions over seven thematic stages contribute to the experience, which uses 3D video, holograms and augmented reality to immerse guests. As visitors and their avatars move through the park, they interact with the attractions using RFID wristbands, while Kinect sensors recognize their gestures, voices and faces. (via Seb Chan)
  2. Digital Citizenship — computers in schools should be about more than teaching more than just typing to kids, they should know how to intelligently surf, to assess the quality of their sources, to stay safe from scammers and bullies, to have all the training they need to be citizens in an age when life is increasingly lived online. (via Pia Waugh)
  3. Simulating Anatomically Accurate Facial Expressions (University of Auckland) — video of a talk demonstrating biomechanical models which permit anatomically accurate facial models.
  4. Depixelizing Pixel Art (Microsoft Research) — this is totally awesome: turning pixel images into vector drawings, which of course can be smoothly scaled. (via Bruce Sterling)