ICVS'09 proceedings published as google book
The Springer proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems held 2009 in Liege, Belgium are published in google books. My own contribution "Evaluating the Suitability of Feature Detectors for Automatic Image Orientation Systems" can be found here.
Article on image processing and recognition in German "Technology Review" magazine
The German edition of the Technology Review magazine has published an article covering industrial applications and potential of image processing and recognition systems, with many comments from Joachim Denzler who leads the research group in Jena. It is a short but interesting insight for interested non-specialists, focussing on the German market. Read article
Debugging and profiling C++ under Linux
Debugging and Profiling C++-Code with the standard GNU tools under Linux may not be as intuitive too many people as it is with bigger IDE's like Visual Studio, XCode or Eclipse. Although I still think that using the GNU debugger gdb and profiler gprof on the command line is feasible, there are more userfriendly choices available:
- Nemiver is a stand-alone graphical debugger for Gnome that can use gdb as a backend. I found it intuitive, well-designed and stable. I features easy browsing of sourcecode, setting breakpoints, and especially save and resume for sessions.
- cgdb is a curses frontend to gdb, that is, a graphical user interface on the command line. It is also intuitive, although tuned for vim-experienced users.
- A comfortable way of profiling your code is to use the KDE call-graph viewer kcachegrind with the callgrind tool of the valgrind suite. Other than using gprof, it does not require compiling your code with special flags. It requires no more than two steps: (1) Calling your binary within the valgrind framework:
valgrind --tool=callgrind [program] [arguments]. (2) Running kcachegrind on the output filekcachegrind callgrind.out.[pid]
Note that what you get with callgrind is not an exact analysis of the time your program consumed in every function and line, but rather an analysis of the cache accesses and processor instructions. This is of similar importance for many profiling purposes, but one should be aware of the differences, and read the manuals carefully for more exact usage of profilers.
On ubuntu, you get the whole setup via aptitude install valgrind-callgrind kcachegrind nemiver cgdb.
Aicon 3D introduces MoveInspect technology
Aicon 3D systems introduces MoveInspect, a modular and flexible photogrammetry-based 3D coordinate measurement system for 3D inspection. Just before the introduction, our students Miriam and Birgit investigated the reliability and accuracy of such systems in a joint work with aicon. The work was part of their diploma thesis, which I supervised.
A good resource for learning about espresso coffee
I recently discovered home-barista.com, a website full of information on coffee machines, coffee history, coffee making and - last but not least - coffee beans. It is a good resource if you want to find out why coffee at home is not as good as in your favourite cafe. I recommend reading through the Home Barista's Guide to Espresso if you're starting to make good espresso at home - it starts right by explaining where the word "espresso coffee" comes from.
British Machine Vision Conference available on Video
My oral presentation about the "Completeness of Coding with Image Features" at the British Machine Vision Conference 2009 in London has been recorded on video. It is now available at videolectures.net. If you're interested in the work, read the full paper.
I highly recommend listening to Alyosha Efros's invited talk, "What can the world tell us about an image?", and Andrew Fitzgibbon's motivating two-hour Tutorial on continuous optimization, covering parts of Triggs' excellent survey of bundle adjustment techniques.