I went to a computer vision conference today.  It reminded me of how much I like computer vision.  It has hard math.  It requires maintaining an interesting dichotomy between the exactitude of computer science and the fuzziness of the real world.  It is a crucial stepping stone on the path to artificial intelligence.   It bridges the gap between ( Read more... )

There's an interesting New York Times article about the beginnings of augmented reality programs that lay data onto the real world as seen through your cellphone's camera.  Thus, you can read about local businesses while looking at them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/12proto.html?hpw

Back in 2003 I took several hundred pictures of my apartment, covering every corner of it from multiple angles.  I figured that within a decade, it would be possible to use software tools to reconstruct the whole place in 3D.  As it turns out they're of the way there already:

This service requires 5-15 photos of an object to reconstruct it in 3D, ( Read more... )

It turns out that one of the most impressive tech demos from Siggraph 2007 is already in Photoshop CS4.

Content-aware scaling lets you resize photos without cropping or stretching. Instead, It just compresses the least interesting parts of the image.

Confused?

Check out this video (skipping the first minute if you don't want the backstory)

This is one of the most interesting applications I saw over the past weekend:

Click to view

It takes everyone's vacation photos online, and then uses image processing algorithms to match features and figure out the shape of what had been photographed and the position it had been photographed from.  Then, the pictures are stitched together in 3D so that you can ( Read more... )