Coming to a close

The end of my first semester of grad school is almost at an end. My last assignment is due tomorrow, along with my last class. I've enjoyed both of my classes so much this semester! I hope you are all doing well. Christmas is approaching very rapidly. Fortunately, I am finished with the shopping that I have to do on my own. I am really looking forward to this break and getting some time to spend with friends, and hopefully getting to explore New England a little more. I don't start classes again until 1/23!

Our apartment is decorated for the holidays, and we both REALLY like how it turned out. Hopefully I can post a picture or two of our apartment.

I have no idea who has found this blog, so feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know you found me.


Well, that's all for now, back to work on my final project for Vision.

Really cool technology

I am starting to get involved with some research projects that are happening inside our graphics research group here at Brown. I am even working on this for my final project in my vision class. But, I thought I'd show you some of the amazing things that have already been completed in this area of research. The research topic is multi-touch displays. This allows direct interaction with a computer with more than just one mouse pointer as you can easily see in the videos that I've included below. These first videos are from Jeff Han, who is a researcher at NYU. Here is a demo he performed when he first unveiled his research to the public.



And another that shows more possibilities.



Similarly, another researcher, Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon has done some cool things that are related to multi-touch displays. But, here is another one of his videos that is a little bit different topic, but still very interesting.



Hope you guys like these videos. Another related project is the "Microsoft Surface" and there is a really cool video about it here:



That's it for now.

Computer Vision

I thought I'd share some of my school work with you. As I previously mentioned, I'm in a computer vision class that has been really interesting. We've had 4 assignments this semester and each one has taught us more about certain areas within Computer Vision. Our last assignment was to create a face tracker using a techniques we learned in class called particle filtering. So, after I completed the assignment and turned it in, I thought it would be fun to let other people see what I am doing, so I exported the images to a video and then uploaded it so you could see it. Here it is, I will explain a little more after the video.


Reid's face tracker

The orignal video was provided to us by our professor. The man in the video is a professor at McGill University in Montreal. The dots on the video represent the "particles" that help track the face. Each dot gets tested to see how likely it is the face. This "likelihood" is represented by the brightness of each dot on the video. I then use the average of these points to estimate where the face probably is. That is represented by the red dot and rectangle.

As you can tell it does an OK job of tracking the face over the course of the video. It isn't perfect but I'm pretty proud that it works at all.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

New England = Crazy Weather!

I thought the weather in Idaho was unpredictable...I was wrong. This place is amazing. Two days ago it was extremely cold, yesterday was average, I walked to school today and I was too warm in a light sweatshirt! 60 degrees! And throughout today it is supposed to continue to get colder and colder, until tonight's low is supposed to be 29.

Random thought this morning.

Time

Well, time is amazing, sometimes it is so fast, and other times quite the opposite. We've been in Rhode Island for almost 4 full months! Amazing. Jess and I just this evening were discussing how much has happened in the last 5 years, even just the last 1 year! Well, now that I'm almost 1/4 done with grad school I thought it might be fun to try and keep everyone up to date on life in New England and my life at Brown.

I really am enjoying my classes and teachers. The professors are outstanding. Here are links to my 2 classes if anyone cares:

• Introduction to Computer Graphics
  (short description: This course offers an in-depth exploration of fundamental concepts in 2D and 3D computer graphics. It introduces 2D raster graphics techniques, including scan conversion, simple image processing, interaction techniques and user interface design. The bulk of the course is devoted to 3D modeling, geometric transformations, and 3D viewing and rendering. A sequence of assignments in C++ culminates in a simple geometric modeler and ray tracer.)
• Introduction to Computer Vision
  (short description: How can computers understand the visual world of humans? This course treats vision as a process of inference from noisy and uncertain data and emphasizes probabilistic and statistical approaches. Topics may include perception of 3D scene structure from stereo, motion, and shading; image filtering, smoothing, edge detection; segmentation and grouping; texture analysis; learning, recognition and search; tracking and motion estimation.)

Just less than 3 weeks left in the semester. I have a couple decent sized projects left and then I will be off until late January. Hopefully a few people will read this blog, once they know about it, but since I don't know who that will be, I don't know exactly how I should "aim" my information. I'd love to talk about the cool new technologies that I keep finding out about, or the awesome program I made last week for my graphics class. But, I'll probably try to steer away from anything too technical. Let me know if you want more specifics on anything.

I don't want to make these too long, so, that's it for now.
Have a great day.