Moving forward again

I'm finally making progress on my Vision project again. After spending a couple of months trying to figure out how to do nonlinear least squares minimisation I think it is now working. I still have quite a bit of testing to do before I am sure it is giving sensible results but so far it looks good. I couldn't have gotten this working without the tireless help of Robin Hewitt who (via the Seattle Robotics Society mailing list) coached me through the process.

I have now returned to the beginning of the project again. Before I go any further I have decided to rework what I have done so far. My understand of computer vision concepts has come a long way since I started this project and I am sure I can improve my original code.

To that end I am writing a camera calibration application that will more accurately calibrate my camera system. This program will be able to calculate the intrinsic parameters of each camera and save and load these parameters from file. It will also be able to calculate the essential matrix of the stereo system and hence will be enable me to far more accurately match SIFT features as I will be able to include the epipolar constraint which I am currently not using.

I am hoping this calibration work will have a drastic improvement on the accuracy of the system, but only time will tell I guess.

Finally back to hacking

Finally managed to get an hour or so of hacking in tonight. I'm trying to figure out how to use the nonlinear least squares minimisation in the GNU Scientific Library. It's pretty tricky and I think it may take a while before I get it sussed out.

I'm hoping to get some time to finish hacking on my changes to the SourceEditorDisplayBinding class in MonoDevelop. This will add the drop down select boxes for jumping to a method definition in code.
Maybe I might get some time for this on Sunday...

So very busy

Had a great time in Berlin last weekend. It wasn't really what I expected and the really famous sites (check point charlie, Brandenburg gate) left me a bit disappointed. We did see a lot of neat stuff though and we really lucky with the weather. The highlight of the weekend was probably the Berlin Dom which was very cool.

The trip was also the first time I had used my new Sigma 28-200mm lens for my SLR. I found it a real pleasure to use and am really looking forward to seeing what the photos are like. The films should be developed this week so I hope to get some photos up on the website by early next week.

Life is still extremely busy and I haven't had a chance to do any hacking for ages. Doesn't look like this week will provide too many opportunites with me busy nearly every night!