Its been a while since I've posted, but here are a couple of interesting things that caught my eye recently.
First, RIM: There are reports of a takeover for Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry. RIM has gotten hammered by the iPhone in the upmarket scene and by the Android tsunami in the mid and low cost sections of the market. In fact, the key (no pun intended) advantage of BlackBerry phones remain security (each device gets its own 32 bit pin) and an email server network that takes it own initiative, pushing email onto your device from, say, your employer's servers. These security characteristics are loved by those in finance and government, all over the world, and so RIM seems to have a niche market for now. Especially since these customer groups are quite loyal: look at how the finance world swears by the Bloomberg terminals. But further growth in RIM might be limited to just these markets and I think that's what shareholders might be unhappy about. Further drama in any possible takeover is due to the Canadian govt; according to this Nytimes article, which claims that Canada may not be open to a foreign takeover of what they consider an "important" company. Well I think, with state support, RIM could survive this lean period to fight another day. From my biased perspective as a supporter of camera-centric thinking, I think RIM should take advantage of its rep as a maker of tough, "phones for the Pro" and perhaps think about camera sensors that would be advantageous to law enforcement, firefighters and first responders: perhaps mobile IR and thermographic sensors on Blackberry phones?
Second, optics for Solar cells: We know that solar cells covert electromagnetic waves from the sun to electricity. But an important part of solar cells are the optics that make sure the maximum possible sunlight is captured by the cell. There are some cool companies out there that use ray tracing (geometric optics) to increase the length of the ray through the photo-sensitive part of the solar cell. The key here is to make the optics flexible and thin, so it can be "rolled out" (basically printed or fabricated) along with the solar cell. So the ideas that dominate solar optics are ones that exploit total internal reflection or rough surfaces. Designs from SolOptics and Morgan Solar follow this trend, and these links have cool explanatory diagrams.
You can also go beyond the optics that collect light, and think about modulating the incoming solar radiation into something that can be easily converted to electricity. The Economist has an article about a "lens" for a solar cell that is made of tiny pits in a sheet of tungsten. The pit size is such that heat from the sun is easily absorbed. But when this heat is re-radiated out from the tungsten sheet, it gets "lost" in the pits and reabsorbed into the sheet. Its a heat trap, that allows easy entry but difficult escape. So the tungsten sheet "trap" gets very hot, and a custom solar cell behind it is tuned so that the heat that does escape the "trap", is mostly converted to electricity.
Happy New Year!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Micro mirrors for 3D and color displays
I've been looking at some of Wallen Mphepö's work, after reading an article in the Economist. According to the article, Mphepö is a researcher at Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University. The research utilizes very tiny mirrors, and there are two applications for autostereoscopic 3D and passive color displays. By tiny, we are talking sub-pixel: many micro mirrors are packed into the space occupied by a single pixel extent.
In the first work on autostereoscopy, a projector is used. Now, usually, a projector projects an image onto a white, almost-lambertian screen. In this traditional scenario, the light from the projector would be uniformly reflected everywhere. But now imagine a "screen" made of tiny reflective micro prisms. Since the "screen" is a bank of tiny prisms, the light gets reflected non-uniformly, into specific directions. In particular, when a light ray from the projector, which corresponds to a single pixel, hits the "screen", it is reflected by a set of micro prisms that correspond to that pixel. If the projected image corresponds to concatenated left and right stereo images, you can specify the slope of the prisms so that the viewing space is filled up with places for an audience to see 3D without glasses. A nice diagram and explanation can be found here.
The second project follows a trend to create passive, reflection-based displays. This is in tune with the E-ink work and also the Mirasol displays from Qualcomm, both of which are easier to view in ambient light. Like the Mirasol displays, the micro mirror work is based on the same thin-film interference effects found in biology. Each micro mirror has two layers, each of which reflect some amount of the incoming light. The reflected light therefore has two components: light reflected from the first layer straightaway and light that is first refracted through the first layer and then reflected from the second layer. These two components are out of phase and interfere, giving rise to colors. The mirrors are controlled by MEMS devices, much like DMD chips, and so can change the incident viewing angle, which changes the perceived color. A nice overview is in the article.
In the first work on autostereoscopy, a projector is used. Now, usually, a projector projects an image onto a white, almost-lambertian screen. In this traditional scenario, the light from the projector would be uniformly reflected everywhere. But now imagine a "screen" made of tiny reflective micro prisms. Since the "screen" is a bank of tiny prisms, the light gets reflected non-uniformly, into specific directions. In particular, when a light ray from the projector, which corresponds to a single pixel, hits the "screen", it is reflected by a set of micro prisms that correspond to that pixel. If the projected image corresponds to concatenated left and right stereo images, you can specify the slope of the prisms so that the viewing space is filled up with places for an audience to see 3D without glasses. A nice diagram and explanation can be found here.
The second project follows a trend to create passive, reflection-based displays. This is in tune with the E-ink work and also the Mirasol displays from Qualcomm, both of which are easier to view in ambient light. Like the Mirasol displays, the micro mirror work is based on the same thin-film interference effects found in biology. Each micro mirror has two layers, each of which reflect some amount of the incoming light. The reflected light therefore has two components: light reflected from the first layer straightaway and light that is first refracted through the first layer and then reflected from the second layer. These two components are out of phase and interfere, giving rise to colors. The mirrors are controlled by MEMS devices, much like DMD chips, and so can change the incident viewing angle, which changes the perceived color. A nice overview is in the article.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
An open-source hardware summit
One of my collaborators has an open-source embedded vision framework called "Embedded eye". He recently attended an open hardware conference. Not knowing much about open hardware, I looked through the conference and some wikipedia pages. I found some interesting projects, such as self-replicator that is basically a printer that can print itself and some work in the mobile space, to give users of smartphones the ability to customize and configure their personal tech gadgets. If you've ever clicked at the link at the top of this blog, you'll notice that personal manufacturing is an integral part of what I call micro computer vision. This is because hacking vision at small scales cannot just be limited to software: you need to be able to fabricate optical and electronic designs. The closer the fabrication experience gets to the convenience of printing paper, the more exciting the field becomes. But you can't fabricate something if its propriety: that is why open hardware is important. More power to them.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
More tiny commerical cameras
Nytimes has an article reviewing new competitors to the micro four-thirds cameras. The most interesting is the Pentax-Q, which David Pogue claims is basically as good as an SLR, but extremely tiny. We are talking approx 4x2x1 inches, which is tiny for a supposed SLR killer. Lots of pictures in the article, including those taken by the cameras.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
More printing coolness
If you read this blog, then you know we love the continuing advent of personal manufacturing, which allows the prototyping of mobile, micro and nano devices with computer vision. We are always on the lookout for cool links. Thanks to AJ for pointing out this website, where you can design and order your own custom, printed parts.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Animal eyes
I recently read a great book by Michael Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson on biological vision sensors. The read was fairly light, since the book is targeted at a range of readers, from undergrads to eye doctors. A colleague at work let me borrow this book, and to be honest I thought I would skim it first to understand how nature and evolution has solved micro computer vision. But instead I read it cover to cover, since it was intensely compelling.
I thought I'd set out some of the interesting facts about animal eyes that I did not know:
1) Animals in the ocean do not use a cornea at all: its just a flap to protect the eye. In addition, sea animals have spherical lenses with variable refractive indices. In contrast, land animals have non-spherical lenses and almost half of our vision comes from the cornea: its our second lens. Amphibians and other creatures that cross the air-water boundary have to somehow "switch" between these two, by either having "goggles" (transparent eyelids that change the eye optics) or by having four eyes.
2) Some sea animals have two or more retinas in the same eye. These look in different directions. The light is shifted around by having mirrors inside the eye!
3) Light scatters so much in the deep sea that certain wavelengths (like infra red) are absent. However, there are some deep sea fish whose eyes still maintain infra-red sensitivity. They also can generate infra-red beacons: so they use infra-red light as a secret communication channel (since there is no other source of this light at that depth).
4) Many nocturnal animals reduce their iris substantially to protect the eye in daytime. Some animals without an iris actually have the retinal cells "migrate" or shift around during the day. There are other animals whose contracted eye resembles templates: for example the contracted chameleon iris is a row of four pinholes: that's a light-field camera!
5) Some birds and reptiles have oil droplets on their retina that allow them to detect color. Its also well-known that many insects and birds are sensitive to polarization and UV light.
6) Birds of prey (raptors) have "pits" in their fovea that allow for an telephoto like effect and gives them extra acuity. This explains their good eyesight from high above.
7) Jumping spiders have a camera array for eyes. Spookfish use mirrors.
8) The infrastructure of retinal tissue (like nerves and blood vessels and so on) is fairly transparent. For example, in land animals (like humans) the nerves that connect to rod and cone cells attach to them in front of the retina. This means that they get in the way, between the scene and the photodetectors. Octopus and squid have the nerves that connect to the retina in the back. A comparison is here.
9) Scallops have mirrors under the retina of their many, many eyes (pic). The retina is transparent and basically the mirror focuses light back into the transparent mush of the retina, and then the image gets detected. Without the mirror, scallops cannot see a focused image. However, many other animals simply have mirrors under the retina, that "resend" light back out from the direction it came from. Since the light retraces its path, it intersects the retina again, allowing the eye a second chance to image the scene point. This enables night vision and is called tapetum. Mirrors in animals are not metallic, but instead use a quarter-wavelength thick film (a thin film) that reflects light through constructive interference of two reflected rays at the medium boundaries.
10) The cell distribution in animal retina is not uniform (for example, fovea in humans). But for some animals, the retinal cells are so non-uniform that they show up as bands in the retina. These bands are associated with regions of importance: for example a "horizon" band for insects that fly over water and need to locate the horizon to navigate. Some animals have "expensive" cells like color cells in a band, and so they need to constantly move the eye around to scan the scene and get a full color image (eg: mantis shrimp).
11) Compound eyes are amazing, and they consist of many ommatidia or eyelets. There are two types of compound eyes which look almost identical from the outside. Apposition eyes are those where the eyelet FOV do not overlap, and each eyelet creates an inverted image of the scene. Superposition eyes have heavy overlap of the same scene point from multiple eyelets and all the eyelets together create one erect image of the scene. Apposition eyes are common in insects whereas superposition eyes are found in lobsters and similar creatures. Many apposition eyes have templates in front of each eyelet, and this creates a moire pattern type effect called a dark spot, which makes it feel as if the insect eye is following you around. Superposition eyelets have a compound lens system with either two lenses or a lens and mirror pair.
I thought I'd set out some of the interesting facts about animal eyes that I did not know:
1) Animals in the ocean do not use a cornea at all: its just a flap to protect the eye. In addition, sea animals have spherical lenses with variable refractive indices. In contrast, land animals have non-spherical lenses and almost half of our vision comes from the cornea: its our second lens. Amphibians and other creatures that cross the air-water boundary have to somehow "switch" between these two, by either having "goggles" (transparent eyelids that change the eye optics) or by having four eyes.
2) Some sea animals have two or more retinas in the same eye. These look in different directions. The light is shifted around by having mirrors inside the eye!
3) Light scatters so much in the deep sea that certain wavelengths (like infra red) are absent. However, there are some deep sea fish whose eyes still maintain infra-red sensitivity. They also can generate infra-red beacons: so they use infra-red light as a secret communication channel (since there is no other source of this light at that depth).
4) Many nocturnal animals reduce their iris substantially to protect the eye in daytime. Some animals without an iris actually have the retinal cells "migrate" or shift around during the day. There are other animals whose contracted eye resembles templates: for example the contracted chameleon iris is a row of four pinholes: that's a light-field camera!
5) Some birds and reptiles have oil droplets on their retina that allow them to detect color. Its also well-known that many insects and birds are sensitive to polarization and UV light.
6) Birds of prey (raptors) have "pits" in their fovea that allow for an telephoto like effect and gives them extra acuity. This explains their good eyesight from high above.
7) Jumping spiders have a camera array for eyes. Spookfish use mirrors.
8) The infrastructure of retinal tissue (like nerves and blood vessels and so on) is fairly transparent. For example, in land animals (like humans) the nerves that connect to rod and cone cells attach to them in front of the retina. This means that they get in the way, between the scene and the photodetectors. Octopus and squid have the nerves that connect to the retina in the back. A comparison is here.
9) Scallops have mirrors under the retina of their many, many eyes (pic). The retina is transparent and basically the mirror focuses light back into the transparent mush of the retina, and then the image gets detected. Without the mirror, scallops cannot see a focused image. However, many other animals simply have mirrors under the retina, that "resend" light back out from the direction it came from. Since the light retraces its path, it intersects the retina again, allowing the eye a second chance to image the scene point. This enables night vision and is called tapetum. Mirrors in animals are not metallic, but instead use a quarter-wavelength thick film (a thin film) that reflects light through constructive interference of two reflected rays at the medium boundaries.
10) The cell distribution in animal retina is not uniform (for example, fovea in humans). But for some animals, the retinal cells are so non-uniform that they show up as bands in the retina. These bands are associated with regions of importance: for example a "horizon" band for insects that fly over water and need to locate the horizon to navigate. Some animals have "expensive" cells like color cells in a band, and so they need to constantly move the eye around to scan the scene and get a full color image (eg: mantis shrimp).
11) Compound eyes are amazing, and they consist of many ommatidia or eyelets. There are two types of compound eyes which look almost identical from the outside. Apposition eyes are those where the eyelet FOV do not overlap, and each eyelet creates an inverted image of the scene. Superposition eyes have heavy overlap of the same scene point from multiple eyelets and all the eyelets together create one erect image of the scene. Apposition eyes are common in insects whereas superposition eyes are found in lobsters and similar creatures. Many apposition eyes have templates in front of each eyelet, and this creates a moire pattern type effect called a dark spot, which makes it feel as if the insect eye is following you around. Superposition eyelets have a compound lens system with either two lenses or a lens and mirror pair.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Mechanical RAM
If you've ever programmed embedded systems, then you know that unless your data is in program or flash memory, then its all gone when the power cycles. Now if you wanted to keep that data around, it would cost energy (since you'd have to keep things powered). The Economist (yes I need new sources, suggestions?) has a neat article about the use of mechanically-based switches to remember data. The article explains two devices, one of which is actually a MEMS switch (literally a piece of metal that breaks a circuit). Although George Boole was not famous while he lived, the first application of his work was in telephone relay switches. Maybe we are coming around, full circle.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Wired contact lenses
The Economist had an article a while back about contact lenses with micro, flexible electronics on them. These aren't visual sensors, but, instead, are placed on the eye surface and can monitor diseases and control drug dosages. Its just another example of how curved, flexible and small electronics enable interesting applications. But if you've read your science fiction then you might suspect that its only a small step before these devices get optical elements. These could enhance vision in wavelengths beyond our visual range, by adding sensors with special filters. Or they could manipulate and augment the incoming visual field using LCDs or LCoS or DMDs. The advantage of having it on the eye would be that the tough brain-electronics interface problem would be avoided. Instead of that interface (which is still current research) the electronics would communicate to the brain by manipulating light, before it falls on the retina.
Monday, June 20, 2011
MicroCV at CVPR 2011: afterthoughts
MicroCV was at the 24th edition of the International conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR 2011), held in the pretty town of Colorado Springs. It reminded me a little of my hometown, Mysore (except the mountains are a lot taller here). I was hoping to report daily from the conference, but the spotty internet access put paid to that thought. So we will have to do with a quick summary.
First the workshops. The choice was spoiling, but mostly I attended the Embedded computer vision workshop (ECV 2011) on Monday since that seemed most relevant to MicroCV. ECV 2011 was opened with an interesting keynote by Mike Piacentino from SRI. Clement Farabet and Yan LeCun's work on a real time configurable processor was very impressive, and included a real-time demo on 10W device. From the sampling of the presentations and the posters, its clear the focus of the ECV community is either dedicated hardware (ASICs) or efficient software implemented on GPUs, ARM Cortexes (Cortices?) and DSPs (TI dominates here).
Another keynote I really liked was Michael Black's at the human activity workshop (HAU3D). One of his main ideas was that two threads of science from the 1800s, Hitzig's work on electric current in the brain and Muybridge's work on human motion, could be now connected by exploiting both modern neuroscience methods and motion capture techniques. Yet another keynote was by Hendrik P. A. Lensch who impressed us all with a gallery of beautiful results from his work on computational illumination. The news was that he was building a hyperspectral dome to further the work on fluorescence effects.
Some broad trends: The Kinect hit CVPR like a comet from outer space. Application papers were everywhere. A paper from the MSR group that created the technology won best paper award. Projector-Camera sessions (PROCAMS 2011) had a session on Kinect ideas. Lots of demos used the Kinect. I think there will be waves of such papers in future CVPRs. Another trend was using stereo as low frequency depth and enhancing it with photometric methods. Although this is an old idea, there was a significant number of papers using it to do fine scale reconstruction.
My limited and incomplete list of interesting papers (sorry if I missed yours, I couldn't attend every session): Glare Encoding of High Dynamic Range from Wolfgang Hedrich's group had a cool idea about recovering the caustics inside light sources. Ivo Ihrke had a paper on Kaleidoscope imaging which was exciting since it had single images with many, many, many views. From 3D Scene Geometry to Human Workspace went further with Alyosha's and Abhinav's idea to exploit block structures to infer higher, human-level abstractions from images. A theory of multi-perspective defocusing had a neat idea of looking at the defocus in cross-slit cameras. Gupta at al. solved an open problem in structured light reconstruction under global illumination while Agrawal at al. did the same for a problem in catadioptric imaging. Michal Irani's group had two papers on mining a video and an image for super-resolution. Tian and Narasimhan had a scale-space theory method for recovering document text from images.
First the workshops. The choice was spoiling, but mostly I attended the Embedded computer vision workshop (ECV 2011) on Monday since that seemed most relevant to MicroCV. ECV 2011 was opened with an interesting keynote by Mike Piacentino from SRI. Clement Farabet and Yan LeCun's work on a real time configurable processor was very impressive, and included a real-time demo on 10W device. From the sampling of the presentations and the posters, its clear the focus of the ECV community is either dedicated hardware (ASICs) or efficient software implemented on GPUs, ARM Cortexes (Cortices?) and DSPs (TI dominates here).
Another keynote I really liked was Michael Black's at the human activity workshop (HAU3D). One of his main ideas was that two threads of science from the 1800s, Hitzig's work on electric current in the brain and Muybridge's work on human motion, could be now connected by exploiting both modern neuroscience methods and motion capture techniques. Yet another keynote was by Hendrik P. A. Lensch who impressed us all with a gallery of beautiful results from his work on computational illumination. The news was that he was building a hyperspectral dome to further the work on fluorescence effects.
Some broad trends: The Kinect hit CVPR like a comet from outer space. Application papers were everywhere. A paper from the MSR group that created the technology won best paper award. Projector-Camera sessions (PROCAMS 2011) had a session on Kinect ideas. Lots of demos used the Kinect. I think there will be waves of such papers in future CVPRs. Another trend was using stereo as low frequency depth and enhancing it with photometric methods. Although this is an old idea, there was a significant number of papers using it to do fine scale reconstruction.
My limited and incomplete list of interesting papers (sorry if I missed yours, I couldn't attend every session): Glare Encoding of High Dynamic Range from Wolfgang Hedrich's group had a cool idea about recovering the caustics inside light sources. Ivo Ihrke had a paper on Kaleidoscope imaging which was exciting since it had single images with many, many, many views. From 3D Scene Geometry to Human Workspace went further with Alyosha's and Abhinav's idea to exploit block structures to infer higher, human-level abstractions from images. A theory of multi-perspective defocusing had a neat idea of looking at the defocus in cross-slit cameras. Gupta at al. solved an open problem in structured light reconstruction under global illumination while Agrawal at al. did the same for a problem in catadioptric imaging. Michal Irani's group had two papers on mining a video and an image for super-resolution. Tian and Narasimhan had a scale-space theory method for recovering document text from images.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Cloud robotics and MicroCV
It all started a couple of years ago when some hackers started putting smartphones on augment-able Roombas (the iRobot Create). I guess they really just wanted a powerful processor that was light enough for the robot to carry around. And then they started using the phone's camera and GPS and wireless...
Meanwhile Google made Goggles. In the eternal war of Telephone vs. Camera, Goggles captures the "Object Recognition" flag for the Telephone. Images are sent to the "cloud" where (relatively) simple algorithms provide amazing results by spending huge amounts of both data and processing power.
Cloud robotics was born when Goggles started to be used as a vision system for robots that had smartphones on them. Here is a semi-recent article that explains Google's strategy and has links to Google's cellbot as well as other cloud robotics projects.
So where does that leave MicroCV? Could we outsource all vision tasks to the cloud?
It seems obvious to me that certain, real-time control tasks would always need to be done on-board. This is especially true if the device is robotic in nature. Otherwise, non-critical or static-platform based tasks could be achieved through the cloud.
Additionally, there is the issue of power. Even a static device would need to consume energy to transmit heavy doses of information over the network. How painful would the energy cost be for reasonable bit rates? I'm not sure, but my gut feeling is that sending out the whole pipeline to the cloud would be infeasible. Alternatively, on-board vision systems could pre-process the image data. Such systems would complement a cloud robotics framework, since they could minimize the power spent on data transmission.
Either way, cloud robotics seems set to affect vision at the smallest scales.
Meanwhile Google made Goggles. In the eternal war of Telephone vs. Camera, Goggles captures the "Object Recognition" flag for the Telephone. Images are sent to the "cloud" where (relatively) simple algorithms provide amazing results by spending huge amounts of both data and processing power.
Cloud robotics was born when Goggles started to be used as a vision system for robots that had smartphones on them. Here is a semi-recent article that explains Google's strategy and has links to Google's cellbot as well as other cloud robotics projects.
So where does that leave MicroCV? Could we outsource all vision tasks to the cloud?
It seems obvious to me that certain, real-time control tasks would always need to be done on-board. This is especially true if the device is robotic in nature. Otherwise, non-critical or static-platform based tasks could be achieved through the cloud.
Additionally, there is the issue of power. Even a static device would need to consume energy to transmit heavy doses of information over the network. How painful would the energy cost be for reasonable bit rates? I'm not sure, but my gut feeling is that sending out the whole pipeline to the cloud would be infeasible. Alternatively, on-board vision systems could pre-process the image data. Such systems would complement a cloud robotics framework, since they could minimize the power spent on data transmission.
Either way, cloud robotics seems set to affect vision at the smallest scales.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Misc. May: Intel Trigate, Microscopes and GE printing
Its been such a busy May for me since it seems like the news from the micro tech world keeps coming at a faster and faster pace. There are tons of things I'd like to discuss in detail, but instead I'm just listing it here:
a) The big news this month, of course, is that Intel is building "3D" gates that have a vertical fin to allow closer packing. PCmag has a good overview of the technology and the Economist explains the corporate drama surrounding the Intel-ARM war to own the future of micro device processors and the implications of the Trigate technology in that battle. The bottom line is that Trigate will allow low power devices that will extend Moore's law further into the decade. (Not for too long: just 2 years. That gives you an idea of how tough it will be to make hardware for micro machines in the future).
b) RK sent me a link about IBM fellows and Nobel prize winners discussing their scanning tunneling microscope. Now I don't know much about quantum effects, but I always thought they were esoteric theories that were used in nuclear power plants and so on. But the STM is essentially a camera that uses quantum theory to take a picture. Its fascinating stuff, and I decided to look at the history of microscopes in wikipedia, which has a good summary. You should really spend an afternoon and learn about microscopes (as I did), but here are two interesting facts to pique your interest and get you started:
c) The BBC has a cool video about Near Field Communication technology that is converting our phones into e-wallets (not just credit cards, but ID cards and driving licenses too).
d) Here is a useful image sensor blog link by the founder of Advasense. Its a good place to go and search for topics on image sensor hardware, say back-illuminated sensors or whatever it is you are currently thinking about.
e) GE is going to be the first big manufacturing company that will produce products (ultrasound devices) by printing them. (Article from the Economist).
a) The big news this month, of course, is that Intel is building "3D" gates that have a vertical fin to allow closer packing. PCmag has a good overview of the technology and the Economist explains the corporate drama surrounding the Intel-ARM war to own the future of micro device processors and the implications of the Trigate technology in that battle. The bottom line is that Trigate will allow low power devices that will extend Moore's law further into the decade. (Not for too long: just 2 years. That gives you an idea of how tough it will be to make hardware for micro machines in the future).
b) RK sent me a link about IBM fellows and Nobel prize winners discussing their scanning tunneling microscope. Now I don't know much about quantum effects, but I always thought they were esoteric theories that were used in nuclear power plants and so on. But the STM is essentially a camera that uses quantum theory to take a picture. Its fascinating stuff, and I decided to look at the history of microscopes in wikipedia, which has a good summary. You should really spend an afternoon and learn about microscopes (as I did), but here are two interesting facts to pique your interest and get you started:
- The use of optical microscopes took off after a heuristic was discovered called the Abbe Sine Law
- Electron microscopes are quite old. The transmission electron microscope was invented in the 30s and the scanning electron microscope in the 60s.
c) The BBC has a cool video about Near Field Communication technology that is converting our phones into e-wallets (not just credit cards, but ID cards and driving licenses too).
d) Here is a useful image sensor blog link by the founder of Advasense. Its a good place to go and search for topics on image sensor hardware, say back-illuminated sensors or whatever it is you are currently thinking about.
e) GE is going to be the first big manufacturing company that will produce products (ultrasound devices) by printing them. (Article from the Economist).
Saturday, May 14, 2011
New panoramic tech plus a note on 3D printing
Its amazing how web-based panoramic image browsing has become such an accepted and normal part of our life: think how accessible Google Streetview, Microsoft's Photosynth and Gigapan are. And this technology hasn't finished changing our world yet: its moving into two new territories.
The first is "indoor streetview" that Google is starting up for businesses. Thanks to RK for bringing this to my attention. Soon you'll be able to invite Google over and get a service setup so that potential customers can browse through images of your small business. Since Google Streetview pushed Google into automated cars (see this link), maybe iRobot needs to start worrying about competition from Google indoor robots? Why stop at businesses, when people already use web-cams to monitor small children from work. Looks like a possible direction for small, portable, low-power visual sensors.
The second direction that panaromic technology is moving toward is stereoscopy. You can find projects to create stereoscopic gigapans and TONS of stereo panoramas on the web. However, these don't actually "work" when you zoom in to see details. Its non-trivial to model the geometry of the scene and re-render 3D images with the right disparity as you closely look at small objects in the scene. MC pointed out that the "right" way to do this would be to capture the light-field at the viewing location. To do this, you would need to smoothly move a video camera in an arc, instead of a stereo pair of still cameras.
Side note on 3D printing: AJ has been working on 3D printer kits that can be assembled for classrooms. Related tools have inspired new kinds of art, as the Nytimes explains.
How long before we have printers that can print printers? The singularity approacheth....
The first is "indoor streetview" that Google is starting up for businesses. Thanks to RK for bringing this to my attention. Soon you'll be able to invite Google over and get a service setup so that potential customers can browse through images of your small business. Since Google Streetview pushed Google into automated cars (see this link), maybe iRobot needs to start worrying about competition from Google indoor robots? Why stop at businesses, when people already use web-cams to monitor small children from work. Looks like a possible direction for small, portable, low-power visual sensors.
The second direction that panaromic technology is moving toward is stereoscopy. You can find projects to create stereoscopic gigapans and TONS of stereo panoramas on the web. However, these don't actually "work" when you zoom in to see details. Its non-trivial to model the geometry of the scene and re-render 3D images with the right disparity as you closely look at small objects in the scene. MC pointed out that the "right" way to do this would be to capture the light-field at the viewing location. To do this, you would need to smoothly move a video camera in an arc, instead of a stereo pair of still cameras.
Side note on 3D printing: AJ has been working on 3D printer kits that can be assembled for classrooms. Related tools have inspired new kinds of art, as the Nytimes explains.
How long before we have printers that can print printers? The singularity approacheth....
Friday, April 29, 2011
Kinect
Yesterday I took the train down to Brown see a set of cool vision talks. One of the presenters talked about "RGB-D" images, which mean different things to different people. To me, RGB-D is an image abstraction. It augments the red, green and blue color channels with a fourth channel which is the pixel depth (the "D" in RGB-D).
Although there are tons and tons and tons of methods that reconstruct scene depths from images, RGB-D folks are agnostic to these. They have an interesting abstraction subtext to their work, which could be summarized as: "Pick a vision reconstruction method that works really well. Lets have it implemented as a hardware black box . Lets now celebrate the fact that we don't have to worry about depth-reconstruction/shape-from-X again. We'll assume that we have perfect depth, and lets build some cool vision on top of that."
I think this attitude is awesome since it gets people to think beyond scene reconstruction.
One of the "black boxes" that give RGB-D images is the Microsoft Kinect. Whats interesting for micro computer vision is an interesting sub-component of the Kinect: a tiny IR projector.
Correction: The Kinect has no IR projector. See updates below.
You can see pics of it here. The Kinect has a stereo-pair-with-projector system. The projector adds texture for the stereo system, but its "projected light" is unnoticed since its in IR and so invisible (You can see the projected pattern here, where a video was taken with a night-vision camera.)
I believe the projector pattern is fixed. This means Microsoft could have gotten away with a very bright IR LED and a physical, printed texture pattern. Why did they use a projector? I'm not sure, but there is an opportunity to hack and control the projector. I'm surprised to have not found anything along those lines yet on the web. I'm particularly curious about the projector's frame rate, and whether high-speed applications are possible.
Update: We have confirmation that the Kinect does not have a projector at all. Thanks to AV for the update. (Also, people actually read the blog.)
Update 2: Thanks to GD for pointing out this website kinecthacks.net
Although there are tons and tons and tons of methods that reconstruct scene depths from images, RGB-D folks are agnostic to these. They have an interesting abstraction subtext to their work, which could be summarized as: "Pick a vision reconstruction method that works really well. Lets have it implemented as a hardware black box . Lets now celebrate the fact that we don't have to worry about depth-reconstruction/shape-from-X again. We'll assume that we have perfect depth, and lets build some cool vision on top of that."
I think this attitude is awesome since it gets people to think beyond scene reconstruction.
One of the "black boxes" that give RGB-D images is the Microsoft Kinect. Whats interesting for micro computer vision is an interesting sub-component of the Kinect: a tiny IR projector.
Correction: The Kinect has no IR projector. See updates below.
You can see pics of it here. The Kinect has a stereo-pair-with-projector system. The projector adds texture for the stereo system, but its "projected light" is unnoticed since its in IR and so invisible (You can see the projected pattern here, where a video was taken with a night-vision camera.)
I believe the projector pattern is fixed. This means Microsoft could have gotten away with a very bright IR LED and a physical, printed texture pattern. Why did they use a projector? I'm not sure, but there is an opportunity to hack and control the projector. I'm surprised to have not found anything along those lines yet on the web. I'm particularly curious about the projector's frame rate, and whether high-speed applications are possible.
Update: We have confirmation that the Kinect does not have a projector at all. Thanks to AV for the update. (Also, people actually read the blog.)
Update 2: Thanks to GD for pointing out this website kinecthacks.net
Friday, April 15, 2011
Stereoscope for the iPhone
The stereoscope was one the first 3D viewing devices. Its a low-tech device that basically places an opaque occluder between your eyes, forcing a separation between what your left and right eye can see. A stereo pair placed correctly on either side of the occluder gives the viewer an impression of depth.
Hasbro has created a very interesting update to the stereoscope for the 21st century. A binoculars-like device pretty much plays the role of an occluder. At the end of the "binoculars", an iPhone or smartphone is attached. A Hasbro app formats 3D content appropriately, so that each eye sees only the correct image through the "binocular" tubes.
This was one of those "why didn't I think of that!" moments for me. Very cool stuff from Hasbro. However, one can't help but think the way forward for mobile 3D devices is more of the autostereoscopic optics from the likes of Nintendo, with its 3DS. The Hasbro device is useful for people who already have an iPhone or similar device and who don't mind the device form factor.
Hasbro has created a very interesting update to the stereoscope for the 21st century. A binoculars-like device pretty much plays the role of an occluder. At the end of the "binoculars", an iPhone or smartphone is attached. A Hasbro app formats 3D content appropriately, so that each eye sees only the correct image through the "binocular" tubes.
This was one of those "why didn't I think of that!" moments for me. Very cool stuff from Hasbro. However, one can't help but think the way forward for mobile 3D devices is more of the autostereoscopic optics from the likes of Nintendo, with its 3DS. The Hasbro device is useful for people who already have an iPhone or similar device and who don't mind the device form factor.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
New Micro Four Thirds models
The Micro four thirds cameras were launched by Olympus and Panasonic about three years ago. A quick recap: SLR cameras have large sensors and pixels and therefore low noise. They also have a "mirror in the loop" that allows the viewfinder to show *exactly* what is going to be photographed. This is done by beamsplitting the incoming light into two paths, one of which goes to the sensor and the other to the viewfinder. These two features force SLR cameras to have a large form factor.
The Micro four thirds system basically tries to be a "pocket SLR" by reducing the sensor size (but not by much) and removing the mirror in the viewing path. It also tries to give the consumer an "SLR feel" by having removable and interchangeable lenses. The nytimes has a nice article about the new cameras, and the sizes are 4.4x2.7x1.3 inches.
This blog always likes to see if innovations meant for the marketplace have an impact on research. I'm not seeing any particular feature of these cameras that we could use in research, since neither the small sizes nor the high quality of images are a game-changer. However, you can think of these cameras as a poor man's SLR. Perhaps we could exploit the cheapness factor in some areas of appearance capture, where many cameras are used...are there applications that need 100s of SLR-like cameras?
A note about image noise and sensor resolution. Large pixel sizes collect more light, so its obvious that this would increase SNR. However, when you purchase a camera, you rarely find two candidate cameras with the same resolution, but one with larger pixel sizes: that would be an easy choice. Instead, you may find one camera with a large sensor and small pixels, while another has a smaller sensor but with larger pixels. Each individual pixel in the second camera should have higher SNR, but the overall sensor size of the first one is larger, and that does have some benefit.
There are sites that explain these relationships in detail. I just want to point out that the right decision is not obvious since resolution and SNR get mixed up when you compare across both those quantities.
The Micro four thirds system basically tries to be a "pocket SLR" by reducing the sensor size (but not by much) and removing the mirror in the viewing path. It also tries to give the consumer an "SLR feel" by having removable and interchangeable lenses. The nytimes has a nice article about the new cameras, and the sizes are 4.4x2.7x1.3 inches.
This blog always likes to see if innovations meant for the marketplace have an impact on research. I'm not seeing any particular feature of these cameras that we could use in research, since neither the small sizes nor the high quality of images are a game-changer. However, you can think of these cameras as a poor man's SLR. Perhaps we could exploit the cheapness factor in some areas of appearance capture, where many cameras are used...are there applications that need 100s of SLR-like cameras?
A note about image noise and sensor resolution. Large pixel sizes collect more light, so its obvious that this would increase SNR. However, when you purchase a camera, you rarely find two candidate cameras with the same resolution, but one with larger pixel sizes: that would be an easy choice. Instead, you may find one camera with a large sensor and small pixels, while another has a smaller sensor but with larger pixels. Each individual pixel in the second camera should have higher SNR, but the overall sensor size of the first one is larger, and that does have some benefit.
There are sites that explain these relationships in detail. I just want to point out that the right decision is not obvious since resolution and SNR get mixed up when you compare across both those quantities.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
ICCP post 2
Yesterday was a packed day at ICCP 2011. Illah Nourbakhsh started out the day with an amazing talk on Gigapan imaging. The philosophical breakthrough he made was to contrast a gigapixel image to a real image.
If you view a gigapixel image you cannot see the "whole" picture, since the resolution is huge (unlike a snap of a family picnic). You have to zoom in and explore the image. Now imagine the image is of some place you haven't ever been to, lets say Mars. So now when you zoom in, Illah says that you are exploring that place, not just viewing a picture.
The optics session that followed was pretty amazing too. Oliver Cossairt had a great talk on the new gigapixel camera from Shree Nayar's lab. The final presentation in this session was Hand-Held Schlieren Photography with Light Field Probes, which won the best paper award at ICCP.
If you view a gigapixel image you cannot see the "whole" picture, since the resolution is huge (unlike a snap of a family picnic). You have to zoom in and explore the image. Now imagine the image is of some place you haven't ever been to, lets say Mars. So now when you zoom in, Illah says that you are exploring that place, not just viewing a picture.
The optics session that followed was pretty amazing too. Oliver Cossairt had a great talk on the new gigapixel camera from Shree Nayar's lab. The final presentation in this session was Hand-Held Schlieren Photography with Light Field Probes, which won the best paper award at ICCP.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
ICCP post 1
I'm sitting in the beautiful Rashid Auditorium listening to the opening of ICCP 2011!
Yesterday there were some tutorials.
I loved the talk by Peter Belhumeur on digital plant detection. The topic may sound a little esoteric to the general audience, but the results were beautiful and the paper was interesting. A nytimes article is here.
Yesterday there were some tutorials.
I loved the talk by Peter Belhumeur on digital plant detection. The topic may sound a little esoteric to the general audience, but the results were beautiful and the paper was interesting. A nytimes article is here.
Friday, April 8, 2011
MicroCV at ICCP 2011
ICCP 2011 starts this week in our fair city of Pittsburgh. MicroCV will be there. Check this space for updates on cool talks, gadgets, presentations and other stuff.
I'll also be presenting a poster on my latest work on optical filtering for micro visual sensors.
More posts soon!
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Nintendo 3DS
More updates on the Nintendo 3DS. If you've been following the blog, then you'll know the post we made previously about how awesome the 3DS is.
Nytimes has an article by a 3D skeptic who loves the display. Also, linked are other articles where reviewers gush about the awesomeness of the device. To paraphrase one reviewer, the 3DS might be cool enough to compete with Apple's effortless chic.
I wonder if they've opened up the 3DS for apps other than games. I guess you could write a "game" that had a more practical application...
Nytimes has an article by a 3D skeptic who loves the display. Also, linked are other articles where reviewers gush about the awesomeness of the device. To paraphrase one reviewer, the 3DS might be cool enough to compete with Apple's effortless chic.
I wonder if they've opened up the 3DS for apps other than games. I guess you could write a "game" that had a more practical application...
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Tech-watches as the new mobile device?
You can call me a geek, but I definitely had a watch like this when I was a kid (image from wikipedia):
I actually had a better one, with a remote control device. It could learn the IR signal from a hand-held remote control and send commands to control any device. It was a miracle and I loved it. I remember annoying one of our teachers at school by messing with the TV/video setup during an AV presentation.
The NYtimes has an interesting article about how tech-watches have simply missed the boat in terms of personal devices. The article mentions some companies that are looking at creating watches that are either replacements or companions to smartphones.
Do they have cameras? Not yet, but they could. They would need to be really low-power. There are also a lot of privacy issues with a person carrying a (possibly) live, uncovered camera on them at all times.
The article sounds skeptical, and I can understand why. Some of the descriptions of possible niches for tech watches seem pretty contrived. The worst is a watch that syncs with your phone, and basically filters certain content that you might want to keep track of. That would really be a meta device, that perhaps constantly keeps track of high-frequency content that is too trivial for you to keep taking your phone out (email, twitter perhaps?).
Also I like the security aspect of it. I find the prospect of losing a smartphone through carelessness to be frightening. If my phone was safely strapped in, while my watch allowed me to limit the number of times I took it out, that would be good.
I actually had a better one, with a remote control device. It could learn the IR signal from a hand-held remote control and send commands to control any device. It was a miracle and I loved it. I remember annoying one of our teachers at school by messing with the TV/video setup during an AV presentation.
The NYtimes has an interesting article about how tech-watches have simply missed the boat in terms of personal devices. The article mentions some companies that are looking at creating watches that are either replacements or companions to smartphones.
Do they have cameras? Not yet, but they could. They would need to be really low-power. There are also a lot of privacy issues with a person carrying a (possibly) live, uncovered camera on them at all times.
The article sounds skeptical, and I can understand why. Some of the descriptions of possible niches for tech watches seem pretty contrived. The worst is a watch that syncs with your phone, and basically filters certain content that you might want to keep track of. That would really be a meta device, that perhaps constantly keeps track of high-frequency content that is too trivial for you to keep taking your phone out (email, twitter perhaps?).
Also I like the security aspect of it. I find the prospect of losing a smartphone through carelessness to be frightening. If my phone was safely strapped in, while my watch allowed me to limit the number of times I took it out, that would be good.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Micro Medical Vision
The Economist has an interesting article about efforts to miniaturize medical imaging systems. Scientists have managed to make a PET scan for rats. The animals can actually wear the devices, and the images are broadcast over periods of time.
First a few comments about medical imaging and medical computer vision. Medical vision is a vibrant field. I'd like to count it within computer vision, but I'm sure people from medical vision might contest that: there are separate conferences and workshops that are quite famous. We in traditional computer vision may be ignorant of the latest in medical imaging, but we know and respect the use of heavy mathematical machinery (applied physics, machine learning and topology) as well as the maturity of technology (Siemens, GE and others build impressive, working medical imaging systems).
Although I'm not up to speed with the latest in the field, I still feel that everyone should be amazed that PET scanners could be built so small. The only similar thing I know of (from my time at CMU) is George Stetten's hand-held ultrasound , which was a major breakthrough.
The mind boggles with the possibilities for medicine in remote locations and the analysis of miniature biological entities like insects (modulo radiation concerns).
First a few comments about medical imaging and medical computer vision. Medical vision is a vibrant field. I'd like to count it within computer vision, but I'm sure people from medical vision might contest that: there are separate conferences and workshops that are quite famous. We in traditional computer vision may be ignorant of the latest in medical imaging, but we know and respect the use of heavy mathematical machinery (applied physics, machine learning and topology) as well as the maturity of technology (Siemens, GE and others build impressive, working medical imaging systems).
Although I'm not up to speed with the latest in the field, I still feel that everyone should be amazed that PET scanners could be built so small. The only similar thing I know of (from my time at CMU) is George Stetten's hand-held ultrasound , which was a major breakthrough.
The mind boggles with the possibilities for medicine in remote locations and the analysis of miniature biological entities like insects (modulo radiation concerns).
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Multitalented Amazon
So when I first came to the United States, in 1999, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, won Time Person of the Year award. It was a heady time, but as we all know, the dot com bubble exploded.
Amazon survived, and built a safe rep as an online superstore.
Then something happened. Perhaps it was always a plan, but Amazon started exploring new horizons, and putting out new products and services that didn't fit with the concept of a boring online bookstore.
I'll quickly mention two of these. The first is mechanical turk (article by nytimes), which is the jewel of the crowdsourcing community. Here Amazon is leveraging its online cloud infrastructure to create a market place for crowdsourcing. The second is the Kindle, where Amazon is betting on low-end personal e-readers. Here Amazon is leveraging its position as the premier online bookstore to provide the best titles.
First, I think this is interesting because it shows Amazon has ambition and wants to be a tech company that produces hardware and software and is not stuck in a niche. Secondly, its only a matter of time before Kindles get cameras, whose needs might be low power consumption and reliability. In addition, computer vision people also are using Turk for a variety of applications.
Interesting times ahead for those of us who track Amazon.
Amazon survived, and built a safe rep as an online superstore.
Then something happened. Perhaps it was always a plan, but Amazon started exploring new horizons, and putting out new products and services that didn't fit with the concept of a boring online bookstore.
I'll quickly mention two of these. The first is mechanical turk (article by nytimes), which is the jewel of the crowdsourcing community. Here Amazon is leveraging its online cloud infrastructure to create a market place for crowdsourcing. The second is the Kindle, where Amazon is betting on low-end personal e-readers. Here Amazon is leveraging its position as the premier online bookstore to provide the best titles.
First, I think this is interesting because it shows Amazon has ambition and wants to be a tech company that produces hardware and software and is not stuck in a niche. Secondly, its only a matter of time before Kindles get cameras, whose needs might be low power consumption and reliability. In addition, computer vision people also are using Turk for a variety of applications.
Interesting times ahead for those of us who track Amazon.
Curved electronics
A lot of my recent research has been on creating optics that can "see" over a wide field-of-view. The main issue is that for conventional electronics, projecting a wide FOV onto a planar imaging sensor creates perspective distortions.
This disadvantage is only one of many that exist with traditional circuitry, since we are restricted to electronics that are created on flat silicon sheets.
Curved, stretchable electronics are coming though.
Prof John Rogers of UIUC and Prof George Whitesides of Harvard have started a company to build curved electronics. If you have seen their papers, then you'll know they have already got a number of interesting applications, such as a curved image sensor to remove spherical distortions.
My interest is in how these will enable flexible, miniature sensors. For now, however, the size of each sensing element ("pixel") is much larger than what we can get with flat CCDs. Hopefully these will reduce over time.
This disadvantage is only one of many that exist with traditional circuitry, since we are restricted to electronics that are created on flat silicon sheets.
Curved, stretchable electronics are coming though.
Prof John Rogers of UIUC and Prof George Whitesides of Harvard have started a company to build curved electronics. If you have seen their papers, then you'll know they have already got a number of interesting applications, such as a curved image sensor to remove spherical distortions.
My interest is in how these will enable flexible, miniature sensors. For now, however, the size of each sensing element ("pixel") is much larger than what we can get with flat CCDs. Hopefully these will reduce over time.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Optical templates made of silk?
The Nytimes has a really interesting article about silk. Its mostly a material science article, with tons of interesting applications.
However, one of the possible directions the silk scientists could go in, is putting millions of tiny mirrors and/or holes onto clear silk. This would allow manipulation of light at very fine granularity.
However, one of the possible directions the silk scientists could go in, is putting millions of tiny mirrors and/or holes onto clear silk. This would allow manipulation of light at very fine granularity.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
HP labs releases annual report that discusses immersive 3D
HP labs has had a good 2010. From its annual report, it appears that over 120 "technologies" (possibly covering software, hardware, patents, processes etc?) have been transferred over to HP businesses.
While this is the propaganda from HP labs itself, and should be taken with a grain of salt, the reputation of the labs in the computer vision community at least is solid. More relevant to this blog, the report has a small section praising the possibilities of mobile 3D and explaining HP's take on the scene.
From what I understand, HP's approach is tightly coupled between displays and autostereoscopy. HP's display hardware research demos don't have anything supersurprising, since they include the usual "paper-like" thin display technologies with a focus on energy efficiency.
A tightly integrated approach between displays and 3D means that HP is thinking deeply about how mobile/immersive displays and 3D displays come together. The implication is that you might see HP products with paper-like, super-thin, autostereoscopic displays sometime soon. Mobile 3D might go massively immersive.
While this is the propaganda from HP labs itself, and should be taken with a grain of salt, the reputation of the labs in the computer vision community at least is solid. More relevant to this blog, the report has a small section praising the possibilities of mobile 3D and explaining HP's take on the scene.
From what I understand, HP's approach is tightly coupled between displays and autostereoscopy. HP's display hardware research demos don't have anything supersurprising, since they include the usual "paper-like" thin display technologies with a focus on energy efficiency.
A tightly integrated approach between displays and 3D means that HP is thinking deeply about how mobile/immersive displays and 3D displays come together. The implication is that you might see HP products with paper-like, super-thin, autostereoscopic displays sometime soon. Mobile 3D might go massively immersive.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Growth in apps
Nytimes says that the growth in apps will reach $38 billion in less than five years.
What are you doing to get a slice of that? ; )
What are you doing to get a slice of that? ; )
Research in industry
As a researcher, I have a biased view that all big tech companies should have large research labs. However, the jury is still out on whether the corporate world is for or against big private investments in research.
Some good news is that the Kinect's success may relieve the pressure on Microsoft Research. Remember it only takes one big hit to pay the bills for many other failed avenues of research. The BBC has an interesting article about it.
However, a more depressing trend is that some companies are moving away from name-brand research labs and towards a decentralized system where the company funds professors at big schools. The Nytimes has the story about Intel's plans.
This follows a trend in computer science, where funding agencies and industry bigwigs feel that money is better spent on cheaper postdocs and grad students than full time researchers. The tendency to wait until a postdoc is a "star" before hiring means that people are spending much more time in grad school and postdoctoral positions, and pretty much putting their life on hold. Thanks to EJ for this link from CRA.
Some good news is that the Kinect's success may relieve the pressure on Microsoft Research. Remember it only takes one big hit to pay the bills for many other failed avenues of research. The BBC has an interesting article about it.
However, a more depressing trend is that some companies are moving away from name-brand research labs and towards a decentralized system where the company funds professors at big schools. The Nytimes has the story about Intel's plans.
This follows a trend in computer science, where funding agencies and industry bigwigs feel that money is better spent on cheaper postdocs and grad students than full time researchers. The tendency to wait until a postdoc is a "star" before hiring means that people are spending much more time in grad school and postdoctoral positions, and pretty much putting their life on hold. Thanks to EJ for this link from CRA.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Microsoft's entrepreneurial drive
Recently Nokia and Microsoft tied up to be a third force in the smartphones arena, after Apple and Google. Nokia has a lot of hardware, but hasn't been able to get the design issues right. They still have phenomenal experience though.
Microsoft actually isn't in such a bad position. They've got cash cows in Office and Windows, and while there is deep competition from both cheap (linux, google web apps) and expensive (apple designer ware) lines, it seems to survive. Then there is Xbox and the successful Kinect.
But a problem with the Nokia-Microsoft endeavor has is that the app "ecosystem" for Windows Mobile is really bad compared to Apple and Google. So it looks like they've come up with ways to get their massive, talented workforce to share some of their development time:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27novel.html?ref=technology
Microsoft actually isn't in such a bad position. They've got cash cows in Office and Windows, and while there is deep competition from both cheap (linux, google web apps) and expensive (apple designer ware) lines, it seems to survive. Then there is Xbox and the successful Kinect.
But a problem with the Nokia-Microsoft endeavor has is that the app "ecosystem" for Windows Mobile is really bad compared to Apple and Google. So it looks like they've come up with ways to get their massive, talented workforce to share some of their development time:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27novel.html?ref=technology
Saturday, February 26, 2011
3D in your hand
Nytimes had an article a while back about stereoscopic displays in mobile devices.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/technology/04novel.html?scp=1&sq=autostereoscopic&st=cse
A little bit of history is in order. If you read Lipton's widely read history of stereoscopy, you'll know that autostereoscopy (or 3D without glasses) was well known in the early days of 3D. The Soviets in fact had built an autostereoscopic cinema theater.
What killed autostereoscopy was that, with a fixed display, there were "sweet spots" or regions where you could see 3D. No one else could fuse the stereo pair. For example, the Soviet 3D cinema theater had a single row of seats straight down the middle!
The genius of recent mobile displays, is that they solve this problem by putting a display in the hand of each and every person in the audience. There is an approximate 3D sweet spot, about a half a foot away from the mobile device. Even if its a bit off, the human has control of the device and moves it about so that autostereoscopy works. This is why you don't need any complicated software. Just the same tech from the 1930s but with modern mobile devices.
Seems to work amazingly. The Economist calls it magical:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/video_games_0
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/technology/04novel.html?scp=1&sq=autostereoscopic&st=cse
A little bit of history is in order. If you read Lipton's widely read history of stereoscopy, you'll know that autostereoscopy (or 3D without glasses) was well known in the early days of 3D. The Soviets in fact had built an autostereoscopic cinema theater.
What killed autostereoscopy was that, with a fixed display, there were "sweet spots" or regions where you could see 3D. No one else could fuse the stereo pair. For example, the Soviet 3D cinema theater had a single row of seats straight down the middle!
The genius of recent mobile displays, is that they solve this problem by putting a display in the hand of each and every person in the audience. There is an approximate 3D sweet spot, about a half a foot away from the mobile device. Even if its a bit off, the human has control of the device and moves it about so that autostereoscopy works. This is why you don't need any complicated software. Just the same tech from the 1930s but with modern mobile devices.
Seems to work amazingly. The Economist calls it magical:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/video_games_0
Pocket projectors!
I wanted to put up an old article by David Pogue, whose tech blogs and general enthusiasm is a constant inspiration, about pocket projectors.
For those of you who don't know, projectors are where camera phones were five years ago. One day everyone will have them. And we have positively no idea what to do with them in terms of computer vision or graphics. I have some ideas, but I'll post them later once I'm published/patented ;)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/technology/personaltech/25pogue.html?scp=5&sq=pocket%20projector&st=cse
For those of you who don't know, projectors are where camera phones were five years ago. One day everyone will have them. And we have positively no idea what to do with them in terms of computer vision or graphics. I have some ideas, but I'll post them later once I'm published/patented ;)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/technology/personaltech/25pogue.html?scp=5&sq=pocket%20projector&st=cse
Printing is the next big thing
The Economist has a massive report on 3D printing. They are agreeing with this blog in believing that 3D printing will enable a lot of people to create devices that were either beyond their skill or budget.
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221
For MicroCV, the advent of 3D printing will mean that any computer vision researcher can print optics, templates, LEDs, lens holders and, of course, imaging sensors at almost any size. We should be able to port every computer vision algorithm to micro, and even nano, machines.
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221
For MicroCV, the advent of 3D printing will mean that any computer vision researcher can print optics, templates, LEDs, lens holders and, of course, imaging sensors at almost any size. We should be able to port every computer vision algorithm to micro, and even nano, machines.
Printing organs
The Economist has a really interesting article about a company named Organovo that is taking 3D printing to the next level: they are printing human organs.
Ok so they are starting with skin and flat cells, but still. With the advances in stem cells, it wont be long before they start printing retinal skins, maybe with electronic interfaces!
http://www.economist.com/node/15543683
Ok so they are starting with skin and flat cells, but still. With the advances in stem cells, it wont be long before they start printing retinal skins, maybe with electronic interfaces!
http://www.economist.com/node/15543683
Sunday, February 13, 2011
About Micro Computer Vision
This blog is about Micro Computer Vision or MicroCV. Computer vision involves creating algorithms for images and video.
MicroCV deals with computer vision for (1) Mobile and (2) Micro/nano devices.
Mobile vision is driven by industry, which makes amazing machines like the iPhone. These may have cameras, pocket projectors and even stereoscopic displays. Our goal in mobile vision is to figure out if these devices (meant for the marketplace) have an impact on research by either enabling new algorithms or making old ones easier.
Micro vision is driven by researchers, who use the amazing tools from 3D printing and related areas to build vision systems for very very small platforms. Our goal in micro vision, is to make computer vision work under the extreme constraints of limited volume, mass, power consumption and computing.
MicroCV will revolutionize the next wave of small devices, which include microrobots and other tiny machines. I am researcher in this area, and I use this blog to keep track of news articles, webpages, academic papers and other sources of information.
Feel free to join the discussion!
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