As we look historically at and plan for future events of this same ilk, we see some common themes. Extensive preparation is one. Redundancy is another. Lately, the native ability to switch content delivery networks (CDNs) on the fly, so that your event has multiple paths to its viewers is key. Some of the aforementioned part failures happened because of a variety of things. From a visibility standpoint, these snafus tend to happen when audiences are largest, which drives the incorrect perception that streaming and OTT technology isn’t ready to handle the largest global events. Hogwash.
So as you nurse your post-Super Bowl heartburn and headache, realize that the reason your Apple TV app, web browser and phone couldn’t play last night’s stream was because someone or a group of people didn’t plan well and think through their design – not that the technology and infrastructure were unable to handle the load. There’s always next year.
Presented by the VES Vision Committee. Presentation by Jon Karafin, Head of Light Field Video for Lytro, followed by a Q&A with all presenters moderated by Scott Squires, VES. View Parts 1-3, as well as an amazing 360 video of the Panel with all presenters at
Event - Light Field Imaging: The Future of VR-AR-MR (Los Angeles)
When:
Tue Nov 17, 2015
6:30pm to 9:30pm
Type:
event
(Image from Light Field Capture device – Photo provided by Lytro)
Light Field Imaging is a technology designed to capture and re-create light rays in a three dimensional scene. It has applications in entertainment, consumer devices, industrial applications and medical imaging. The presentations will cover the latest research in this technology which promises to revolutionize virtual, augmented and mixed reality.
Paul Debevec, Chief Visual Officer, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, will present the latest technologies being developed at USC ICT on light fields and photoreal virtual actors for Virtual Reality. He will cover the areas of high-resolution face scanning, real-time photoreal digital characters, and light field capture and playback for creating breathtaking realistic and interactive VR content.
Mark Bolas, Director for Mixed Reality Research at USC Institute for Creative Technologies, will describe the MxR Lab and Studio’s recent work on: Discovering Near Field VR Stop Motion with a Touch of Light Fields and a Dash of Redirection which won the Best VR/AR competition at SIGGRAPH 2015.
Jules Urbach, Founder & CEO of OTOY will discuss OTOY’s cutting edge light field rendering toolset and platform.
Jon Karafin, Head of Light Field Video for Lytro, a company which develops light field cameras will discuss light field technologies and their application in visual effects workflows, cinematography and virtual reality as well as the next generation of state-of-the-art capture systems
he ESP8266 WiFi Module is a self contained SOC with integrated TCP/IP protocol stack that can give any microcontroller access to your WiFi network. The ESP8266 is capable of either hosting an application or offloading all Wi-Fi networking functions from another application processor. Each ESP8266 module comes pre-programmed with an AT command set firmware, meaning, you can simply hook this up to your Arduino device and get about as much WiFi-ability as a WiFi Shield offers (and that’s just out of the box)! The ESP8266 module is an extremely cost effective board with a huge, and ever growing, community.
This module has a powerful enough on-board processing and storage capability that allows it to be integrated with the sensors and other application specific devices through its GPIOs with minimal development up-front and minimal loading during runtime. Its high degree of on-chip integration allows for minimal external circuitry, including the front-end module, is designed to occupy minimal PCB area. The ESP8266 supports APSD for VoIP applications and Bluetooth co-existance interfaces, it contains a self-calibrated RF allowing it to work under all operating conditions, and requires no external RF parts.
There is an almost limitless fountain of information available for the ESP8266, all of which has been provided by amazing community support. In the Documents section below you will find many resources to aid you in using the ESP8266, even instructions on how to transforming this module into an IoT (Internet of Things) solution!
Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it won’t cost the agency a dime.
Even though the technology is marketed as budget neutral, that doesn’t mean no one has to pay. Instead, Texas police fund it by gouging people who have outstanding court fines and handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use.
ALPR refers to high-speed camera networks that capture license plate images, convert the plate numbers into machine-readable text, geotag and time-stamp the information, and store it all in database systems. EFF has long been concerned with this technology, because ALPRs typically capture sensitive location information on all drivers—not just criminal suspects—and, in aggregate, the information can reveal personal information, such as where you go to church, what doctors you visit, and where you sleep at night.
Vigilant is leveraging H.B. 121, a new Texas law passed in 2015 that allows officers to install credit and debit card readers in their patrol vehicles to take payment on the spot for unpaid court fines, also known as capias warrants. When the law passed, Texas legislators argued that not only would it help local government with their budgets, it would also benefit the public and police. As the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Allen Fletcher, wrote in his official statement of intent:
[T]he option of making such a payment at the time of arrest could avoid contributing to already crowded jails, save time for arresting officers, and relieve minor offenders suddenly informed of an uncollected payment when pulled over for a routine moving violation from the burden of dealing with an impounded vehicle and the potential inconvenience of finding someone to supervise a child because of an unexpected arrest.
Optotune’s focus tunable lenses are shape-changing lenses based on a combination of optical fluids and a polymer membrane. The core element consists of a container, which is filled with an optical liquid and sealed off with a thin, elastic polymer membrane. A circular ring that pushes onto the center of the membrane shapes the tunable lens. The deflection of the membrane and with that the radius of the lens can be changed by pushing the ring towards the membrane or by exerting a pressure to the outer part of the membrane or by pumping liquid into or out of the container.
Working principle of Optotune’s manual lens ML-20-35, which achieves a lens shape ranging from concave to flat to convex. The ring that forms the lens is pushed towards the container, thus filling the lens with liquid
Optotune uses electroactive polymers (EAPs) as an electrostatic actuator for its series of laser speckle reducers. These so-called "artificial muscles" can undergo a large amount of deformation while sustaining large forces. While today's piezoelectric actuators only deform by a fraction of a percent, EAPs can exhibit a strain of up to 380%. There are different types of EAPs. Optotune has specialized in dielectric electroactive polymers (DEAPs) as described below. A detailed discussion on all types of EAPs can be found here.
Electrowetting displays are just as capable as the liquid crystal displays in tablets and notebooks, but they are three times more efficient. Johan Feenstra, who heads Samsung's electronic display research center in the Netherlands, explains how they work.
This e-paper is currently under development by Ricoh.
It has a unique structure, with layers of a new electrochromic material that turn magenta, yellow, and cyan from their transparent state. In this way, Ricoh's e-paper enables a bright, full-color display, like ordinary paper, which hasn't been possible with e-paper until now.
This prototype is a 3.5-inch, QVGA display, with a pixel density of 113.6 ppi. Its reflectivity is 70%. Compared with current color-filter displays, this e-paper is 2.5 times brighter. It has a color reproduction range of 35%, higher than that of a newspaper, which is 31% in Japan.
"To produce colors, CMY subtractive mixing is ideal, and that's the model used in printing. We've implemented this by coating the panel with layers of yellow, magenta, and cyan. Ordinarily, if you try to use layers like this, you need an electrode driver for each layer. But in this display we're developing, the electrodes are active TFTs. So, we can achieve all colors with a single TFT, by switching the electrodes on the display side."
The material used for the chromic layers is transparent in its oxidized state, but becomes colored when it's reduced. To achieve a color display, rewriting is done three times in the order magenta, yellow, cyan. As the spaces between the electrochromic layers are narrow, at about 2 microns, the result is an ideal color-mixing display.
"The stage we're at right now is, we're checking that this model works with an actual active panel. Regarding the color drive, we haven't refined this yet, so switching takes over a second for each color. But the reaction speed of the chromic material is, ideally, about 100 ms."
"From now on, we'd like to increase the size to 6 inches, then 10 inches. We also want to work on achieving stable driving and faster response."
Brion Vibber has been working on ogv.js, an Ogg video player in JavaScript, supporting both audio and video. We've seen video codecs in JavaScript before, such as Broadway (H.264),Route9 (WebM/VP8), and more but mostly without audio support to go along with it. We have audio codecs in JS too, just not combined with video yet. That changes with ogv.js.
A community called "Robots for Good" has come together to help kids stuck in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London visit the zoo. If the name hasn't given it…
Drones are notoriously difficult to handle indoors: hard to control and prevent crashing into walls or people.
Augmented Pixels has been actively developing technology (including SLAM) to ensure safe flights as well as intuitive and easy navigation using Augmented Reality.
They came up with a platform that significantly reduces accident rates and minimizes the effect of "human factor". Moreover, it is possible to program the drone to fly around and land by itself.
The prospects for this technology include a wide range of use cases (e.g. inspection of premises for security, creation of 360-degree tours, etc.).Augmented Pixels is located in Palo Alto, CA.
Harish Manohara, principal investigator of the project at JPL, working in collaboration with surgeon Dr. Hrayr Shahinian at the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles, who approached JPL to create this technology.
MARVEL's camera is a mere 0.2 inch (4 millimeters) in diameter and about 0.6 inch (15 millimeters) long. It is attached to a bendable "neck" that can sweep left or right, looking around corners with up to a 120-degree arc. This allows for a highly maneuverable endoscope.
“Multi-Angle and Rear Viewing Endoscopic tooL” (MARVEL) denotes an auxiliary endoscope, now undergoing development, that a surgeon would use in conjunction with a conventional endoscope to obtain additional perspective.
To operate on the brain, doctors need to see fine details on a small scale. A tiny camera that could produce 3-D images from inside the brain would help surgeons see more intricacies of the tissue they are handling and lead to faster, safer procedures.
An endoscope with such a camera is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. MARVEL, which stands for Multi Angle Rear Viewing Endoscopic tooL, has been honored this week with the Outstanding Technology Development award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium. An endoscope is a device that examines the interior of a body part.
“With one of the world’s smallest 3-D cameras, MARVEL is designed for minimally invasive brain surgery,” said Harish Manohara, principal investigator of the project at JPL. Manohara is working in collaboration with surgeon Dr. Hrayr Shahinian at the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles, who approached JPL to create this technology.
MARVEL’s camera is a mere 0.2 inch (4 millimeters) in diameter and about 0.6 inch (15 millimeters) long. It is attached to a bendable “neck” that can sweep left or right, looking around corners with up to a 120-degree arc. This allows for a highly maneuverable endoscope.
Operations with the small camera would not require the traditional open craniotomy, a procedure in which surgeons take out large parts of the skull. Craniotomies result in higher costs and longer stays in hospitals than surgery using an endoscope.
Stereo imaging endoscopes that employ traditional dual-camera systems are already in use for minimally invasive surgeries elsewhere in the body. But surgery on the brain requires even more miniaturization. That’s why, instead of two, MARVEL has only one camera lens.
To generate 3-D images, MARVEL’s camera has two apertures — akin to the pupil of the eye — each with its own color filter. Each filter transmits distinct wavelengths of red, green and blue light, while blocking the bands to which the other filter is sensitive. The system includes a light source that produces all six colors of light to which the filters are attuned. Images from each of the two sets are then merged to create the 3-D effect.
A laboratory prototype of MARVEL, one of the world’s smallest 3-D cameras. MARVEL is in the center foreground. On the display is a 3-D image of the interior of a walnut, taken by MARVEL previously, which has characteristics similar to that of a brain. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Skull Base Institute.
Now that researchers have demonstrated a laboratory prototype, the next step is a clinical prototype that meets the requirements of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The researchers will refine the engineering of the tool to make it suitable for use in real-world medical settings.
In the future, the MARVEL camera technology could also have applications for space exploration. A miniature camera such as this could be put on small robots that explore other worlds, delivering intricate 3-D views of geological features of interest.
“You can implement a zoom function and get close-up images showing the surface roughness of rock and other microscopic details,” Manohara said.
“As a skull base surgeon with a specific vision of endoscopic brain surgery, it has been a privilege and a great personal honor working with the JPL team over the past eight years to realize this project,” Shahinian said.
MARVEL is being developed at JPL for the Skull Base Institute, which has licensed the technology from the California Institute of Technology. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech.
From: "Embedded Vision Insights from the Embedded Vision Alliance" <newsletter@embeddedvisioninsights.com> Date: August 25, 2015 at 10:53:20 PM GMT+8 To:john.sokol@gmail.com Subject:Visual Intelligence Through Deep Learning; Open UC Santa Cruz Faculty Position; More
The Alliance continues to publish videos of great presentations from May's Embedded Vision Summit. Make sure you check out, for example, the highly rated keynote "Enabling Ubiquitous Visual Intelligence Through Deep Learning," by Dr. Ren Wu, formerly distinguished scientist at Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning (IDL). Dr. Wu shares an insider's perspective on the practical use of neural networks for vision.
While you're on the Alliance website, make sure to check out all the other great content recently published there. And for timely notification of the publication of new content, subscribe to our RSS feed and Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn company and group, and Twitter social media channels. Thanks as always for your support of the Embedded Vision Alliance, and for your interest in and contributions to embedded vision technologies, products and applications. Please don't hesitate to let me know how the Alliance can better serve your needs.
Brian Dipert Editor-In-Chief, Embedded Vision Alliance
FEATURED VIDEOS
"Embedded Lucas-Kanade Tracking: How It Works, How to Implement It, and How to Use It," a Presentation from Goksel Dedeoglu of Perceptonic Goksel Dedeoglu, Ph.D., Founder and Lab Director of PercepTonic, presents the "Embedded Lucas-Kanade Tracking: How It Works, How to Implement It, and How to Use It" tutorial at the May 2014 Embedded Vision Summit. This tutorial is intended for technical audiences interested in learning about the Lucas-Kanade (LK) tracker, also known as the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) tracker. Invented in the early 80s, this method has been widely used to estimate pixel motion between two consecutive frames. Dedeoglu presents how the LK tracker works and discuss its advantages, limitations, and how to make it more robust and useful. Using DSP-optimized functions from TI's Vision Library (VLIB), he also shows how to detect feature points in real-time and track them from one frame to the next using the LK algorithm. He demonstrates this on Texas Instruments' C6678 Keystone DSP, where he detects and tracks thousands of Harris corner features in 1080p HD resolution video.
Introduction to the Embedded Vision Opportunity and the Embedded Vision Alliance Community Jeff Bier, Founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance and President and Co-Founder of BDTI, presents the introductory remarks at the May 2015 Embedded Vision Summit. Jeff provides an overview of the embedded vision market opportunity, challenges, solutions and trends. He also introduces the Embedded Vision Alliance and the resources it offers for both product creators and potential members, and reviews the event agenda and other logistics.
Neural Network Processors: Has Their Time Come? Lately, neural network algorithms have been gaining prominence in computer vision and other fields where there's a need to extract insights based on ambiguous data. Classical computer vision algorithms typically attempt to identify objects by first detecting small features, then finding collections of these small features to identify larger features, and then reasoning about these larger features to deduce the presence and location of an object of interest (such as a face). These approaches can work well when the objects of interest are fairly uniform and the imaging conditions are favorable, but they often struggle when conditions are more challenging. An alternative approach, convolutional neural networks ("CNNs"), massively parallel algorithms made up of layers computation nodes, have been showing impressive results on these more challenging problems. More
Facebook Oculus Acquires Pebbles Interfaces for Gesture Control Last month, Facebook's subsidiary Oculus reported that it had acquired Israel-based Pebbles Interfaces. Based in Israel, Pebbles Interfaces has spent the past five years developing technology that uses custom optics, sensor systems and algorithms to detect and track hand movement. Pebbles Interfaces will be joining the hardware engineering and computer vision teams at Oculus to help advance virtual reality, tracking, and human-computer interactions. More
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LETTERS AND COMMENTS TO THE EDITOR: Letters and comments can be directed to the editor, Brian Dipert, at editor@embeddedvisioninsights.com.
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(Venue of this event is TBD. Looking for suggestions/ offers to host this event as well) Earlier this year, I created Hackabot Nano (a feature-rich Arduino compatible wheeled robot). It was crowdfunded through Kickstarter. The robot was p...
Just when we thought we were done with the video codec wars in WebRTC – we found out we're only just beginning.
In the past several weeks we've seen the names Thor, Daala, VP9 and H.265 thrown in the news as potential candidates to replace our current generation of video codecs. How is that going to play out, and where are we headed with all this?
We can't be sure but we think Tsahi Levent-Levi can make a few educated guesses about it.
Join TokBox and Tsahi to discuss the power plays of the video coding industry.
Come along to TokBox HQ at 6:00pm for a 6:30pm start.
As usual, we will provide pizza and beer.
We look forward to seeing you there!
About the speaker:
Tsahi Levent-Levi is an Independent Analyst and Consultant for WebRTC.
Tsahi Levent-Levi has over 15 years of experience in the telecommunications, VoIP and 3G industry as an engineer, manager, marketer and CTO. Tsahi is an entrepreneur, independent analyst and consultant, assisting companies to form a bridge between technologies and business strategy in the domain of telecommunications.
Tsahi has an MSc in Computer Science, and an MBA degree specializing in Entrepreneurship and Strategy. Tsahi has been granted three patents related to 3G-324M and VoIP. He acted as the chairman of various activity groups within the IMTC, an organization focusing on interoperability of multimedia communications.
Tsahi is the author and editor of bloggeek.me, which focuses on the ecosystem and business opportunities around WebRTC.
In 1975, 26-year old Kodak engineer Steve Sasson presented his prototype digital camera to the company's technical, marketing and business development...
I thought we where pushing the limits at the time by playback of digital audio off memory and later even streaming off a floppy drive.
This goes to show that not only could the audio have been done but video.
Now to be honest they are using a sound blaster card which didn't exist for another 6 years or so Aug 87.
The only things that's changed is optimization and algorithms, improvements in software development tools, completely open documentation and countless examples as well as easy access to video source materials.
I wasn't able to capture video till around 1984 it was a black and white threshold and looked dreadful and took several seconds to capture 1 image. A wasn't able to capture a proper grey scale till 1987 and it was a board that cost several thousand dollars. Color video capture wasn't until in 1990 on a Sun work station, all of this was exotic and super expensive at the time.
It wasn't till 1995 with the Matrox meteor at $500 that decent high quality video capture was possible. We were just reaching 90 to 120 Mhz Pentiums at that time.
Imagine what could be possible with today's hardware if only the software where optimized?
Demonstration of turning a light field image into a viewable image using the GPU to accelerate performance.
https://youtu.be/lcwm4yaom4w
http://www.netbooknews.com/9917/futur... There was alot going on during the Day 1 Keynote at Nvidia's GPU conference, as far as consumer are concerned there was one significant demo. The demo involved Adobe showing off a technology being developed using a plenoptic lens aka one of those lenses that looks like a bug eye. By attaching a number of small lenses to a camera, users can take a picture that looks, at first, like something an insect might see which, each displaying a small part of the entire picture. Using an algorithm Adobe invented, the multitudes of little images can be resolved into a single photo. The possibilities are endless on how you can manipulate the photo. 2D image are made 3D & they can adjust the focal point in real time so the background comes into focus and the subject blurry. Fingers crossed this gets into Adobe CS6 or CS7.
This is a excellent article talking about light field / plenoptic cameras, Pelican imaging, Lytro and listing out all the signigicant published papers in this area. http://3dsolver.com/light-field-cameras-for-3d-imaging/
Abstract:
This work is based on the plenoptic 2.0 camera, which captures an array of real images focused on the object.
We show that this very fact makes it possible to use the camera data with super-resolution techniques, which
enables the focused plenoptic camera to achieve high spatial resolution. We derive the conditions under which the
focused plenoptic camera can capture radiance data suitable for super resolution. We develop an algorithm for
super resolving those images. Experimental results are presented that show a 9× increase in spatial resolution
compared to the basic plenoptic 2.0 rendering approach.
Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.4.3 [Image Processing and Computer Vision, Imaging
Geometry, Super Resolution]:
Image and Depth from a Conventional Camera with a Coded Aperture Anat Levin, Rob Fergus, Fredo Durand, Bill Freeman
Abstract
A conventional camera captures blurred versions of scene information away from the plane of focus. Camera systems have been proposed that allow for recording all-focus images, or for extracting depth, but to record both simultaneously has required more extensive hardware and reduced spatial resolution. We propose a simple modi_cation to a conventional camera that allows for the simultaneous recovery of both (a) high resolution image information and (b) depth information adequate for semi-automatic extraction of a layered depth representation of the image. Our modification is to insert a patterned occluder within the aperture of the camera lens, creating a coded aperture. We introduce a criterion for depth discriminability which we use to design the preferred aperture pattern. Using a statistical model of images, we can recover both depth information and an all-focus image from single photographs taken with the modified camera. A layered depth map is then extracted, requiring user-drawn strokes to clarify layer assignments in some cases. The resulting sharp image and layered depth map can be combined for various photographic applications, including automatic scene segmentation, post-exposure refocussing, or re-rendering of the scene from an alternate viewpoint.
The new technology utilizes reflective, see-through OLED panels that can be combined wtih augmented reality overlays powered by 3D cameras. You know, for shopping.
Computational Cameras: Convergence of
Optics and Processing
Changyin Zhou, Student Member, IEEE, and Shree K. Nayar, Member, IEEE
Abstract—A computational camera uses a combination of optics
and processing to produce images that cannot be captured with
traditional cameras. In the last decade, computational imaging has
emerged as a vibrant field of research. A wide variety of computational
cameras has been demonstrated to encode more useful visual
information in the captured images, as compared with conventional
cameras. In this paper, we survey computational cameras
from two perspectives. First, we present a taxonomy of computational
camera designs according to the coding approaches, including
object side coding, pupil plane coding, sensor side coding,
illumination coding, camera arrays and clusters, and unconventional
imaging systems. Second, we use the abstract notion of light
field representation as a general tool to describe computational
camera designs, where each camera can be formulated as a projection
of a high-dimensional light field to a 2-D image sensor. We
show how individual optical devices transform light fields and use
these transforms to illustrate how different computational camera
designs (collections of optical devices) capture and encode useful
visual information.
Index Terms—Computer vision, imaging, image processing,
optics.
OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration), often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces that provides abstractions for routines especially useful for audio, video, and still images processing. It is intended for low power and embedded system devices (including smartphones, game consoles, digital media players, and set-top boxes) that need to efficiently process large amounts of multimedia data in predictable ways, such as video codecs, graphics libraries, and other functions for video, image, audio, voice and speech.
#TWiSTLive!! Virtual reality is an exciting & hotly debated space. Its potential is massive, but will it ever really "arrive"? In today's live show, recorded at Samsung Global Innovation Center, Jason answers this question with a resounding YES, as he demos the latest & greatest VR and hosts a riveting fireside chat with Amir Rubin, VR pioneer & CEO of Sixense, a premiere virtual reality platform. After a lively demo of Sixense's cutting-edge, award-winning products, Jason talks with Amir about his inspirations, the state of the field, and what's coming. We learn why VR is not just about gaming but about every industry (esp. healthcare, education), why motion sickness is no longer an issue, how technologies like 3D printing help VR immensely, how developers are building amazing applications on the Sixense platform, how every phone going forward will be VR ready, why VR is so effective in training for high-risk jobs like welders & pilots, why service providers will give VR headsets away for free, how VR is going to be a new way for creative people to monetize their skills, how movie studios can use VR for you to actually experience being the super hero, why the biggest challenge facing VR is educating consumers -- and much much more!
