software

Stephen Pugh, a researcher from Aberystwyth University, is developing algorithms for robots to quickly discover locations of interest and choose targets for pictures without human intervention. He is working on panoramic cameras in robotic planetary rovers within the ExoMars Programme – a project led by the European Space Agency with NASA. More information is available in a WalesOnline article.

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.

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.

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.