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Submitted by Massimo Bertozzi

VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge

The World Expo 2010 that will be held in Shanghai, China, is the third most relevant worldwide event after the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, 70 millions of visitors from all over the world are expected to visit the Expo. This year’s theme is “better cities, better life”; issues related to sustainable mobility are indeed central to the Expo, which will be a display of new ideas developed worldwide in this field.

VisLab is going to participate to the Expo with a project, partially funded by ERC - European Research Council- that will show that it is possible, although in a prototype version, to move goods between two continents with non-polluting vehicles powered by green energy and with virtually no human intervention. Some goods will be packed in Rome, some collected throughout the trip, and finally taken to Shanghai on vehicles with no driver for the first time in history.

Fixstars Corporation, a Tokyo-based multicore software provider, has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA. The operating system is aimed at NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate graphics and GPGPU applications (such as financial services, image processing). According to the HPCWire article, until recently, Fixstars focused mainly on Power CPUs and the IBM Cell Broadband Engine.

Sony Corp has unveiled the Move controller for its PlayStation gaming console. The controller can be used with the PS3 Eye gaming webcam to translate user motions into game actions. The controller is shaped like a TV remote with a colorful ball at one end. More information is available in a press release.

Point Grey recently introduced their Flea3 ultra compact cameras that measure only 29 x 29 x 30 mm. The camera incorporates a FireWire 800-Mbps interface, with mono and color versions of an image sensor from Sony. According to the product website, Flea3 offers new features such as opto-isolated GPIO for industrial triggering and strobe output, non-volatile flash memory for user data storage, and an on-camera frame buffer.

Google has introduced a new way to view user photos on its Street View application. According to a blog posted by Daniel Filip and Daniel Cotting, (Computer Vision Team, Google Zürich), "user photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives". A new interface in the upper right corner allows viewing of a variety of user-submitted photos from Picasa, Panoramio, and Flickr.

Xsens Technologies, which sells an inertial motion capture suit, and Image Metrics, which provides facial animation services based on computer vision methods, have partnered to provide a complete body and face animation solution. The combined solution allows actors full freedom of motion. The technology is already in use by a special effects studio, Double Negative. More information is available in a press release.

Imprivata, a company that provides secure login and authentication systems, has announced a new product that locks a workstation when a user walks away and automatically re-authenticates the user when he or she returns. The product, called OneSign Secure Walk-Away, uses computer vision to identify users and determine their presence.

Xilinx Inc revealed their Industrial Imaging Targeted Design Platform for applications such as high-resolution digital video conferencing, video surveillance, and machine vision systems. The platform has a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA, and includes several reference designs. More information is available in a press release.

Franklin Electronic Publishers is marketing a camera-based paper money reader for the visually impaired. In the United States, all bills are the same size regardless of denomination, making it difficult for the blind to securely engage in cash transactions. The handheld Franklin device uses technology from Evolution Robotics to recognize individual bills; the amount is spoken out loud by the device.

Lior Ron, Google Senior Product Manager, will be presenting a talk entitled "Looking into Google Goggles" at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference on March 31, 2010 in San Jose, CA. Google Goggles is a visual search application for Android mobile phones. According to the conference program, "this talk will dive into how they [Google] made it happen and what the computer is actually seeing".