Idée Inc.

I just ran across a very cool website that I'd like to share. labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr They also have a collection of other image searching tools that are very cool and very useful. Their main website is ideeinc.com

I'm sure this type of searching technology will (and already has) become very prevalent in the different media forms that are stored digitally. Already I can think of Pandora that does this type of search with music and BookLamp that does it with books. Amazing!

Mom, california, and school

Another quick update. First, I picked up my mom from the airport (Providence airport) last night and she will be staying with us until Monday which is fun and exciting since we hadn't seen either of my parents since graduation last May. It's hard though because I have school all week still which I will discuss in more detail in just a minute. My mom went to work with Jess today which should make the day more enjoyable for both of them.

To answer a question...the Pixar internship is paid, and it in itself is a huge answer to prayer. Before I was offered the position I knew it was paid, but I had no idea how much or any of the other details. Well, it turns out it pays better than any other internship that I know of! And since Jessica's 36 hour a week nanny job has been supporting us all year, it will be very good to have some more income that will help us survive the next year until graduation next May. So, that's a huge praise...oh and the position has a "standard" work week of 50 hours. Which could be interesting if I get a job there after school (they expect at least 50 hours from their employees). But, for now it is a blessing as well since anytime over 40 hours is time and a half. Also, since 50 is standard for them, you get paid for 50 even if you don't put in quite 50. So, that is good for me too. And, housing for interns is provided by Pixar in furnished intern apartments. So, I will have a roommate or two, but I don't have to worry about the cost.

Also of note. My school year ends the second week of May. Between then and when I leave for Pixar, Jessica and I will be moving into a new apartment. It is just about .5 a mile from where we currently live, but I think it fits us better than our current one. Mainly, I think the cost of utilities will be a lot more manageable. And there is A/C for the hot/muggy parts of summer. I'll try to remember to post pictures once we move.

Finally, I wanted to update a little about the current status of school. I've had a lot of programming projects this semester and that won't change until the semester is finished. I'm trying to finish the last regular assignment that I have. And then I will be working very hard on two final group projects. One for each of my classes. If you are at all interested in the work that I've done in my graphics class this semester, they are listed on the assignments page for the course. It can be found here. Also, since each of these assignments were based on one or more research papers form the last few year, the papers themselves can be found here. Image Analogies was the hardest, followed closely by Photon Mapping (my output at right). I won't go into details about these unless one of you want to know. But, they make some cool pictures. Both of my final projects are going to be a TON of work, but hopefully I will do the best I can and get it all done in the month that is left of school.

How exciting!

I do have readers! 2! Well, at least I know someone sees this. And just so you guys know, I read your as well...and have them both in my google reader list.

So, for an update. First it snowed last night. It was so peaceful and nice, then this morning...rain and frozen mush all over everything. Oh well. And we are supposed to have flash-flood conditions today and tomorrow.

Enough about the weather. So, first cool thing I found recently. A firefox extension that turns photo galleries into something truly amazing. It's called PicLens and if you have Firefox you can see what it does and get it for free at: http://www.piclens.com. (If you don't have/use Firefox, you should!) Here's a preview:


Also another firefox note, I really like this theme.

Ok, more personal now. Classes have really started and are extremely busy. Both classes are more work than I anticipated, but, in my graphics class we get to make some really pretty pictures in just a couple weeks. Using a technique called Photon Mapping. Essentially we model the characteristics of real photons bouncing around a scene and then render that on the scene. more about this hopefully once I get there. For now I'll say that I've been very slightly involved in work that has continued from my Vision final assignment last semester. Just a reminder that I did my final project on processing video for a multi-touch display system. Here's the final video output that I produced at the end of the project. And I will also link to the final research paper that I wrote and turned in. It is pretty technical, but feel free to at least look at the very professional format and the nifty pictures.

Obviously, with what I had to work with, my results were not perfect. The idea was that we simply want to keep track of any fingers touching the screen over a series of consecutive frames. Since I finished this project another Master's student has started his Mater's research by taking my results and some other ideas and beginning to create the software to actually allow us to use our multi-touch table. I will probably be helping out occasionally with this project, and it just might be the research I do for my degree also.

Here's the paper: http://cs.brown.edu/people/reid/VisionFinal.pdf

And the video:

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.