software

ModiFace Inc. has recently announced its AgeTell application that can visually simulate the effects of aging on user photos. According to the press release, the technology can be used for entertainment as well as professional purposes, such as forensics use by the FBI and police.

Intel released a video showing the use of Intel's Ct Technology to develop computer vision applications. Ct was developed by Intel Research in an effort to extend the C/C++ program language for high throughput applications.

Researchers at MIT have developed a system that allows programmers to develop software using screen shots of the GUI (graphical user interface). The system, named Sikuli, enables novice computer users to write programs without mastering any programming languages. Computer vision algorithms are used to analyze any actions on the GUI.

Ricoh Co. Ltd. has posted an interview with one of the company’s R&D team members, Dr. Haike Guan. He works in Ricoh’s Software Research Center in Beijing, China, on image processing and security technologies. The interview covers some aspects of the development work on lens distortion correction, long-exposure noise reduction, and skew correction in the company's latest digital cameras.

Codium Labs, LLC, released Babelshot, an IPhone app that allows real-time translation of printed text by taking a snapshot of the text. The user has to take a photo and select the portion of text for translation, before the translated text is displayed next to the original photo. According to a press release, Babelshot performs the text recognition on the mobile device rather than offloading the task to a web server.

Jan Wedekind presented Computer vision using Ruby and libJIT at RubyConf IX at San Francisco, California last week. The presentation covered the use of the Ruby programming language, the HornetsEye computer vision toolkit, and the libJIT just-in-time compiler to build real-time vision applications. The presentation slides include many code examples. The presentation overview is here.

The new version of DxO Lab's image processing and enhancement software, Optics Pro 6, is now available for Windows and will be available for Mac OS X in early 2010. The noise reduction capability enables users to effectively gain one or two f-stops beyond the values supported by the camera itself. Optics Pro 6 also provides corrections for lens distortion, vignetting, color fringing, lens softness, volume anamorphosis, and keystoning.

Canadian startup company Claron Technology announced the availability of its computer vision based software platform, the Withinsight Framework (WIF). WIF is a collection of software components for rapid construction of medical image analysis and visualization applications. The Withinsight framework can be used to build both standalone applications and client-server applications.

New media artist Mary Franck will hold a workshop for artists and programmers. The workshop will cover programming the MAX/MSP/Jitter graphical programming environment for interactivity, with an emphasis on computer vision. The event will be held in San Francisco on October 13 and October 15. See the workshop site for more details.

Dr. Christoph Bregler and colleagues from the NYU Movement Lab have developed an IPhone application, called DotShow, for users to record video and perform motion capture. The results, consisting of a video of marker dots, are stored on a server and are available publically. The intent is to use DotShow as a crowd sourcing tool to obtain real world data to study human movement in the Green Dot project. The marker dot representation allows for the video subjects to remain anonymous.