personal

It’s been a while

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

So it’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been pretty busy with life and work over the last few weeks. A lot has happened since the bombings here in London, but I still find myself thinking about them alot.

We had a great weekend in the sunshine last weekend. London put on a great day on Saturday and we had an awesome picnic in Battersea park as a bit of a farewell to a couple of our housemates who are moving on.

I’ve been busy hacking too. I have been working on some new functionality for MonoDevelop and hope to get that incorporated into the next release. I have more ideas but lack the time. You can see some of the efforts of my recent hacking in this picture. The drop down on the left above the source window displays all the classes in the current file, the expanded drop down on the right displays all the members, properties and methods. Selecting one of these will jump you to the appropriate location in source.

I’m also hoping to get some time to get back to hacking on my vision project which I have neglected for far to long now.

Episode III and … Success!

/ James Fitzsimons / 1 Comment

Well, it’s been a pretty good weekend and I’ve just got home from Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, which I can report is actually quite good and grateful departure from the rubbish that has been Episodes I and II. Hayden Christensen manages to display slightly more emotion than a block of wood in this movie, and the final scenes as he makes his transition to become Lord Vader are really quite cool.

I can happily report that I have finally cracked the rotation problem that has been holding me up on the vision system. I can now estimate camera ego motion between frames which is a vital part of the SLAM process. Hopefully some time this week I will have the system actually running properly with the two cameras and prove that it all works.

Anthea and I are off to Seville this coming weekend so I should go start learning some spanish… adiós!

Fun weekend but still stuck

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

Anthea and I had a fun weekend with a trip to Leads castle and some wine tasting at the oldest winery in Kent (yeah, apparently the English make wine 😉 leads castle was great. It has really beautiful grounds and the castle itself is very pretty and we managed to conquer the maze which was fun. They also had about 20 or so birds of prey sitting out on their perches waiting for the falconry display at 1:30 (which we missed unfortunately) and it was really cool to see some of these magnificent birds up close.

I received a little parcel from Amazon on Friday. I’ve finally got my second camera so should be doing real stereo vision soon. I am still COMPLETELY stuck on deriving the rotation from two sets of points using least squares however. I have a set of 3d co-ordinates which represent a set of features observed at time t1, and then I have another set of 3d co-ordinates which represent the same features at time t2. What I am trying to do is establish the translation and rotation of the camera platform between time t1 and t2. The translation is easy, but the rotation is giving me a real headache! I know I need to use a least squares minimisation, but the actual implementation escapes me. It is getting pretty annoying now too as this has held me up for a couple of weeks now. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this knows how to do this can you please contact me!

Ah well, back to reading Math world and my perpetual state of confusion :-/

I wish weekends were three days long…

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

Well, it’s Sunday night and I really wish that weekends were three days long. I could really do with just one more day off this weekend. I feel like I haven’t had a decent break in ages and need a bit of relaxing and unwinding time. Most of the travelling Anthea and I do is pretty full on and not much time for relaxing so I haven’t really had a break since Christmas and beginning to feel a bit flat.

Had a few little wins over the weekend and am feeling pretty happy about it. I finally seem to have my xdaIIi syncing with Evolution properly. I am using SynCE and multisync to sync my Evo contacts, task list and calendar. It seems like a pretty solid setup now. I think my initial problems were down to some faulty partnerships I created while trying to set everything up.

I also managed to get a bit of solid hacking done on my Vision project this weekend. I don’t really have any visable results to show for my efforts, but I know I am making progress. Hard to explain to your significant other that you are really excited because you’ve finally figured out how to calculate the intrinsic matrix for your camera and undistort images 😉

I also managed to get some of the translation and rotation matrix multiplication working. Well actually it’s still untested as of yet, but it compiles and runs. I am rapidly approaching the point where I am going to need to get the other camera now so I can do proper stereo. I was holding off purchasing until I was sure I was going to be able to get the first one working correctly with opencv and mono and have now reached the point where I am pretty happy with it.

Anthea and I went for a huge walk around Hyde park in the sun today. It’s amazing the change in Londoners when spring rolls round and the sun comes out. I’m sure half of London was in the park playing frisbee or walking the dog or playing with the kids, and it’s really nice to see so many people out and enjoying themselves.

Never enough time

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

So I haven’t blogged in ages. I have been pretty busy with various things, but unfortunately haven’t been able to make much progress on my Vision system lately.

Anthea and I spent 4 days in Prague over the Easter break which was cool. It is a really beautiful city if you can get past the hordes of tourists. Also not quite as cheap as people make out either. I am planning to put photos up on the website soon (I know, you’ve heard that before!).

Finally got my new phone last week, an xdaIIi. Very cool device and I’m loving it so far. Had a bit of fun last night trying to build synce to get it syncing with linux. Unfortunately synce and all its dependancies are hard masked for amd64 on Gentoo, so I had to build it all in my 32bit chroot and am going to try running all the 32bit binaries with linux32 from my 64bit environment. I got as far as creating a serial connection last night and that worked so I think this strategy might just succeed.

Am going to see Neil and Tim Finn in concert at the Royal Albert hall tonight, so won’t have a chance to push on any further with the vision system. I am struggling with the opencv calibration routines at the moment. I need to use these to extract my cameras intrinsic parameters, focal length etc, but it is proving very difficult so far. Hopefully some dedicated hacking this week/weekend will see some progress.

Oslo and the news

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I have just come back from a great weekend in Oslo. It’s a interesting place although not really at all like Stockholm which came as a bit of surprise to me. Anthea and I did as much site seeing as we could getting to the Viking ship museum, Folk museum, sculpture park and ski jump in the one and a half days we were there. I’ll post the photos to the travelling section of my website shortly.

Saw this on slashdot today. It appears that MDRobotics (makers of the Canada arm I & II on the International Space Station) have been working on a similar project to me. They have created some software that can reconstruct a 3d model of a scene photographed by a stereo camera system. Their software also uses Lowe’s SIFT features.