After a short break

On the train on the way back from a weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon and decided I have been remiss in neglecting my blog for so long. I often get overwhelmed by the pace of life in London and things like blogging seem to quickly drop of the list of priorities, however the other day while reading back over some of my past entries I realised that it is an important record for me as well as a way of keeping in contact with distant friends and family.

Anthea and I have certainly been very busy this year, and when I reflect back on what we have done this year I realise it has probably been the most social year of our lives, combined with the most travelling we have ever done - and for me at least - one of the most challenging working years of my career. I am very proud of what we have achieved this year and although I am very tired and desperately looking forward to our Christmas break I wouldn't have had it any other way. My goal now is to try and figure out how to fit more into next year!

I have been neglecting my vision project over the last few months. Making small progress by picking at it whenever I've had some spare time. What hasn't helped is that a couple of months ago I decided to build a Mythtv box to record the hockey (since most of it is screened in the middle of the night). This has turned out to be a far far more challenging task than I anticipated and has consequently stolen time from my other projects. The good news is that the end is finally in sight and I will hopefully have a stable system running in the next week or two.

I have spent some of this weekend reading the chapter on Structure Computation in my computer vision text. Essentially working out how to reconstruct a 3D scene from stereoscopic information. I think I understood most of it on first reading - which testifies to the fact that a lot of the revision work I have been doing on linear algebra has paid off. My plan is to implement a naive algorthim first, and once that is working refine it with an optimal (and much more challenging) solution. It is still my hope that once I have the reconstruction phase working the rest of the project will progress along very quickly. I am still amazed at how difficult the elementary concepts of computer vision are. I really had no idea of what I was getting myself into when I started this project.

The worlds most inconsistent blogger

That's me! I just can't seem to get into the habit of blogging on a regular basis. Quite a bit has happened since my last post. I've just delivered a pretty major project at work which went well I think. It was a massive amount of work though, and really draining long days which has left me desperately in need of a holiday. Luckily Anthea and I have the next two weeks off to trip around northern Italy! We are both really looking forward to it and have been hearing amazing stories from our friends about places to visit.

I have also returned to my computer vision project. I got talking about it to a mate a few weeks back and found myself getting really enthused again. Of course the reality of the situation is that it is still bloody hard work, but I am taking a much more systematic approach this time and taking more time to try and fully understand the math before coding. My first goal is to reliably find the fundamental matrix. Once I have that nailed, 3d reconstruction shouldn't be too hard.

I got another LG 19" monitor this week so I now have a cool dual head setup. I'll take a pic and post it sometime soon.

Tricky stuff

So it turns out this 3d reconstruction stuff is a lot more complicated than I initially thought. I am trying to get the essential matrix for my camera system, however I am having real trouble getting something that makes sense. I have code that produces an output, it's just wrong.

It would help if I had a really good text that explained this stuff in baby language so a math retard like me could understand it but unfortunately I don't at the moment so I am doing a lot of googling. I have ordered Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision from Amazon as this seems to be the authoritative text, however its got a 4-6 week delivery time.

Looks like this could take a while.