ersonal lives are typically irrelevant to the Web, so if you don’t care about this blog as a personal journal, then jog on to save time. A lot of the content has been about computer vision (since 2004), but sometimes I just wish to share personal stories and this is my only personal space (unlike Techrights or various accounts which are merely hosted by a third party).

The past week or so has been great over here. It feels like summer. Last Thursday I went out for dinner with a friend and the following day to another restaurant with another friend, with whom I might start a company soon (we are both academics, he is a professor). The following day we met again and the day afterward there was BBQ out in the wild. But it was short-lived as time was limited (it was followed by music at my house for about 4 hours), so after some time riding in the sun and learning new areas around Manchester we prepared for a massive BBQ and a bonfire, followed by a pub crawl. The temperatures today might reach 28 degrees (centigrade), and there is no end in sight yet to this sort of heat wave that motivates me to go cycling again in a while. Every day is full of play and fun.

In other personal news, we’ve finally found a venue for the wedding and the missus is looking at some dresses. With a quarter of the day being consumed by conversations with her I have not had much time for activism as of late. I hope this will change.

Yesterday at the BBQ

The morning after (today)

n order for identification of vehicles to work (for navigation, not Big Brother application) I am preparing a paper on some existing methods. Along the way I found some interesting videos. The first one shows OpenCV on Android phones:

OpenCV on desktop hardware can achieve more, with high-resolution images as well:

Vehicle classification (not OpenCV):

For collision prevention it helps to estimate speeds of relative speed of nearby vehicles. Here is an application which is measuring vehicle speed on the fly:

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)