A screen shot for your viewing pleasure

Tonight I managed to get a clunky little UI working. It took a bit of work as it calls out to a C library I wrote via interop. The UI was designed using Glade and uses the Gtk widget set. It's so easy to build decent GUI applications using the Glade/Gtk/mono combination in no time at all. If I had a choice I would love to develop in Gtk instead of winforms in professional life too!

So, here's the screen shot:



The text you can see next to the buttons is the Fundamental matrix calculated for the chess board points found in the stereo image pair. The UI needs a bunch more work, but it's really only a test harness and a debugging tool for me while I get the application working properly. Once the system is put on a real mobile platform it won't have any GUI interface.

The next step is to test if the epipolar constraints I was talking about in my last post actually improved the accuracy of the matching process.

Anthea and I are off to Germany tomorrow to visit some friends and see some Christmas markets. Should be a great time and hopefully I might find some good photo opportunities too.

Slow progress

The epipolar geometry turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. I now have enough of it done to be able to check the epipolar constraint successfully. I am now in the process of reworking my stereo matching algorithm to include the epipolar constraint along with disparity, orientation, scale and uniqueness constraints. I'm hoping this will improve my matching algorithm and reduce any false positives. That in turn should improve my localisation accuracy as there will be fewer outliers and less error to minimise.

It's been pretty hard to find time to work on this stuff recently as we have been so busy socially. I guess it's that time of year with Christmas parties, catching up with friends etc. We are going to Germany this weekend and are off to India for two weeks from the 25th of Dec so I won't really get time to do any decent hacking on this for the next month or so. I am really hoping that I have enough of the pieces in place that I'll be able to make some good progress in the new year and actually be able to report some reasonable results.

I have been doing a little bit of reading about FPGA design lately and am getting quite excited about that stage of the project. I expect that will be immensely difficult but should be quite interesting too.