HAVE NOT had much time to blog recently simply because a lot was going on in my personal life. December 18^th is our provisional wedding date and we’re preparing many things. Here are some photos from last week (the second one was edited by her cousin, who took the photo on her phone).

or the uninitiated, I’ve started working with Android for computer vision research. According to Wikipedia, “OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real time computer vision, developed by Intel and now supported by Willow Garage. It is free for use under the open source BSD license. [...] The library was originally written in C[2] and this C interface makes OpenCV portable to some specific platforms such as digital signal processors. Wrappers for languages such as C#, Python,[3] Ruby and Java (using JavaCV[4]) have been developed to encourage adoption by a wider audience.”

The library can be fetched from here (OpenCV-2.4.0-android-bin.tar.bz2) and it is a very large library that requires cmake to compile:

roy@roy:~$ cmake
cmake version 2.8.0

Also see android-cmake.

For use under Linux and Android (device side), download the Android NDK for Linux:

roy@roy:~$ uname -a
Linux roy 2.6.32-33-generic #70-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jul 7 21:09:46 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

Then:

sudo apt-get install swig

Here is what I got (as shown by tabbing):

roy@roy:~$ swig
swig      swig-1.3  

JDK 5 or JDK 6 can be downloaded from the Oracle Java SE Downloads page. Here is where the Linux version can be obtained. Also download the Android SDK and install Ant:

sudo apt-get install ant

Then, set the path as follows (in my case a temporary location):

export ANDROID_NDK=/home/roy/Desktop/Text_Workspace/images/opencv/android-sdk-linux

The four main components are OpenCV, the SDK, NDK, and JDK. Here’s how it looks on my desktop:

Some instructions suggest a route for Eclipse users, in which case the following may be in order:

apt-get install eclipse

Tegra Android Developer Pack, which can be found under Tegra Resources at the NVidia Web site, simplifies much of the process above and integrates all the pertinent bits.

Other resources of interest:

• Introduction to programming with OpenCV
• OpenCV Beginners/Newbie Frequently Asked Questions
• Managing Virtual Devices
• Using OpenCV with Eclipse / CDT plugin
• Eclipse OpenCV Linux
• OpenCV Installation Guide
• OpenCV4Android documentation
• Using Android binary package with Eclipse
• (Outdated) Android 2.3.0
• OpenCV Tutorials

The Crowne Plaza (taken with Android smartphone)

At the beach

Stargazing

Stargazing II

Stargazing III

A walk out in nature

Matching shirts

The working area

watching a DVD

A day in the orchard

Near our cabin

Our view to the lake from the hotel

Walk around the lake at night

In the outdoor pool

The cabin’s jacuzzi

First time wearing the sunglasses (a gift)

AM going to start an Android project quite soon, as my latest posts probably helped show. The drawback is that it will be less research-oriented and more implementation-oriented. On the other hand, Android is becoming de facto OS in the mobile market and it increasingly seems like Dalvik development is a valuable skill. My three siblings all use Eclipse and my fiancée studied Java back in the days as well, so it only makes sense for me to come back to Java. Currently we explore what the project will involve, with questions arising such as:

• What features are simpler to implement for baseline functionality, e.g. collision detection?
• What framework, e.g. opencv, is available for rapid development?
• Possible technical collaborations of relevance?
• What is the innovation worth exploring/adding?
• Is stereovision (deriving 3-D) an option or just 2-D?
• What products are already out there and how competitive are they?

illow Garage was created by former Google employees with a talent in robotics. The Willow Garage Web site links to this new page on OpenCV for Android, bringing together detailed instructions. OpenCV is used widely in research labs and on mobile platform it will be interesting to test some cutting-edge methods. It is possible that I will soon explore this path of work. But first, starting tomorrow, I shall spend 8 days with my fiancée.

Clinical and exercise studies have always been a passion of mine, not just computer vision and graphics. I am currently hooking up with some good folks who are eager to start some projects and perhaps companies (based around computer science, which is what everyone in my family does), meaning that there will not be much free time for my activism. I will be away from Techrights until the end of next week.

s a bit of a dinosaur in technology (I still use a Palm PDA and single- or dual-core AMD), backward compatibility and long-term support are important to me. I am not a fan of PHP even though many programs that I like (the latest being Roundcube) use it almost exclusively.

Many problems seem to occur for those who use old versions of Gallery with the latest PHP, which has become notorious for its backward compatibility deficiencies. One bit of software that I use which is not compatible with PHP 5.3 is Gallery 1.x. It’s a version that I hacked a bit to suit my purposes, so upgrading would flush all my customisations away. Whether a sandboxed compatibility mode is available (such that, e.g., PHP 5.2 is run for specified paths) I do not know yet, but based on what people are saying suppressing the warnings and errors should be possible. It’s not a real solution but a cosmetic hack. If your Web host undergoes a PHP upgrade to 5.3 it can lead to lots of issues associated with out-of-date software. “A short time ago,” wrote my host (with which I host about 10 domains), “we emailed you to let you know that we were upgrading all our servers to the latest version of PHP. This is now complete. We therefore recommend you have a quick check of your site and ensure everything is working as it should.”

The bottom line is, from my personal point of view, is that PHP yet again proves that backward compatibility is too much for it to handle and, as such, one oughtn’t rely on long-term usage of programs written in PHP. Other authors pointed this out before. It’s quite the blunder. In Web-based environments in particular, a case of “lose compatibility or get cracked” may become more common if we become dependent on PHP.