Saturday, November 14, 2015

OGV.JS: AN OGG THEORA AND VORBIS VIDEO DECODER IN JAVASCRIPT

OGV.JS: AN OGG THEORA AND VORBIS VIDEO DECODER IN JAVASCRIPT


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.


Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Fwd: A great use for virtual reality headsets.


Perhaps also hinting at possible virtual tourism in the very near future (Oculus Rift is set to be released in 2016).

 

This Robot Will Let Kids In Hospital Explore Zoos Through Virtual Reality

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…

iflscience.com

 


Thursday, November 05, 2015

Google Open Spherical Camera API

Mechanical television



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television



http://hackaday.com/2010/04/13/mechanical-scanning-television/

http://www.earlytelevision.org/mechanical_tv.html

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold/archiv/TV/mechanical/scanningdisc.htm

http://www.home1.stofanet.dk/television/

http://www.home1.stofanet.dk/television/pjgn.html

Saturday, September 05, 2015

Augmented Pixels: Indoor Navigation Platform for Drones

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. 

Tiny 3D Camera Offers Brain Surgery Innovation


http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4702

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.
http://www.skullbaseinstitute.com/press/adjustable-viewing-angle-endoscopic-brain-surgery.htm

“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.


http://neurosciencenews.com/marvel-3d-neurosurgery-camera-2573/

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.
Image shows the MARVEL camera.
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.
Source: Elizabeth Landau – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Fwd: Visual Intelligence Through Deep Learning; Open UC Santa Cruz Faculty Position; More



Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

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

Embedded Vision Insights
embedded-vision.com embedded-vision.com
VOL. 5, NO. 15 A NEWSLETTER FROM THE EMBEDDED VISION ALLIANCE Late August 2015
IN THIS EDITION
To view this newsletter online, please click here
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Colleague,Embedded Vision Summit

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.

In "Navigating the Vision API Jungle: Which API Should You Use and Why?", Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, maps the landscape of APIs for vision software development. Long-time Alliance collaborator Gary Bradski, President of the OpenCV Foundation, provides an insider's perspective on the new version of OpenCV and how vision developers can utilize it in his presentation, "The OpenCV Open Source Computer Vision Library: Latest Developments." Also make sure to take a look at "Harman's Augmented Navigation Platform: The Convergence of ADAS and Navigation" from that company's Vice President of Technology Strategy, Alon Atsmon.

Roberto Mijat, Visual Computing Marketing Manager at ARM, explores when it makes sense to utilize a graphics core as a coprocessor in his presentation, "Understanding the Role of Integrated GPUs in Vision Applications." And echoing Dr. Wu's neural network focus, Jeff Gehlhaar, Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm, used his presentation "Deep-learning-based Visual Perception in Mobile and Embedded Devices: Opportunities and Challenges" to discuss the benefits, challenges and solutions for implementing neural networks in mobile and embedded devices. And the insights continued the next day at the quarterly Alliance Member Meeting: in "Combining Vision, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Answer Everyday Questions," Faris Alqadah, CEO and Co-Founder of QM Scientific, explains how his firm is simplifying shopping for consumers by extracting and organizing product information from many data sources.

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 PerceptonicPercepTonic
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 CommunityEmbedded Vision Alliance
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.

More Videos

FEATURED ARTICLES

Neural Network Processors: Has Their Time Come?BDTI
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 ControlTouch Display Research
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

More Articles

FEATURED COMMUNITY DISCUSSION

Faculty Position Open at UC Santa Cruz

More Community Discussions

FEATURED NEWS

Upcoming Free Qualcomm Vuforia Webinar Discusses Enabling Mobile Apps to See

Intel Expands Developer Opportunities as Computing Expands Across All Areas of Peoples' Lives

Altera Launches Worldwide SoC FPGA Developers Forums

ON Semiconductor Introduces Series of Advanced Image Co-Processors for Next Generation Automotive Camera

More News


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Sunday, August 23, 2015

Let's build a humanoid robot with computer vision


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hack A Robot <info@meetup.com>
Date: Saturday, August 22, 2015
Subject: Invitation: Let's build a humanoid robot with computer vision



Meetup
New Meetup
Hack A Robot
Added by Thomas Lee
Thursday, August 27, 2015
6:30 PM
South bay area
TBD
South bay area, CA

(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...