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Intel Releases Open-Source Stereoscopic Software
Eslyjah writes "Intel has released a software library that allows computers to "see" in 3D. The library is available for Windows and Linux, under a BSDish license. Possible early applications include lipreading input. Check out the CNN Story, Intel Press Release, and project home page."
When it is missing the leading "<"! Try this
Try the CNN story here.
This is not for rendering in 3d, but for allowing a machine to build a 3d model (internally) of the environment it uses. I assume it is based on the same sort of binocular mechanism as animal eyes, but the algorithms to build the internal structure are probably pretty advanced.
A cool application (I haven't seen if they've done this yet) is rendering in Open GL the internal view of what the robot eyes see. It would allow you to walk through a building, and then have a 3D model for various other uses. Reverse engineering blueprints.
THis would be great technology to have on any mars lander, or even just to analyze the data sent back.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
I've heard this called Photogrammetry .
... from the Third Edition of the Manual of Photogrammetry, is somewhat simpler in statement and that definition of photogrammetry is, the science or art of obtaining reliable measurements by means of photographs.
t.
The Intel computer vision library is not the only such resource available. The TINA machine vision system has been developed since 1986 and provides functionality for the machine vision researcher at both the infrastructure level (datastructures and functions for an enormous range of mathematical, statistical and image processing tasks) as well as state-of-the-art solutions to many machine vision problems. These include low-level feature extraction, robust primitive fitting, object tracking, 2D object recognition and 3D object location. Indeed the stereoscopic subsystems in TINA (PMF, Stretch Correlation) have been viewed for many years as the standard for edge based stereo. TINA is almost unique as a resource and living archive of over 70 man years of research and over 200 peer reviewed publications in machine vision and medical image analysis. Functionality in TINA has practical utility in several industrial contexts.
For the past 5 years TINA has been provided as open source under an LGPL license and development is now based at the University of Manchester, UK.
Whilst I am very pleased that Intel recognise the importance of machine vision research and can only commend them on their open source approach I have some reservations regarding the use of OpenCV by the research community at large. Certainly their motives are business orientated (and one cannot argue with this). Therefore, however, the contents of their library are ultimately dictated by what Intel want not necessarily what the research community might need or indeed what is even possible (such as dense estimates of stereo).
Open Source software is vital in research disciplines where there is a significant software component. What better way to disseminate your results than to encapsulate your entire experimental apparatus in a tar file! Why should others in the field waste time reimplementing your algorithms (probably incorrectly) in order to duplicate your results. A process which sits at the very heart of any scientific endeavour.
TINA has recently received direct funding from the European Union for developed as the open source environment for machine vision and medical image analysis research. For more details of TINA visit the website at http://www.tina-vision.net
Sorry to rant a bit but it is not often I read something on here that I know so much about!
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"