Category Archives: computer vision

CES2017: Astrophotography In The Eyepiece

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If you’ve never set up a telescope in your back yard, you’ve never been truly disappointed. The Hubble can take some great shots of Saturn, nebulae, and other astronomical phenomena, but even an expensive backyard scope produces only smudges. To do astronomy properly, you’ll spend your time huddled over a camera and a computer, stacking images to produce something that almost lives up to your expectations.

At CES, Unistellar introduced a device designed to fit over the eyepiece of a telescope to do all of this for you.

According to the guys at Unistellar, this box contains a small Linux …read more

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The Story of Kickstarting the OpenMV

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Robots are the ‘it’ thing right now, computer vision is a hot topic, and microcontrollers have never been faster. These facts lead inexorably to the OpenMV, an embedded computer vision module that bills itself as the ‘Arduino of Machine Vision.’

The original OpenMV was an entry for the first Hackaday Prize, and since then the project has had a lot of success. There are tons of followers, plenty of users, and the project even had a successful Kickstarter. That last bit of info is fairly contentious — while the Kickstarter did meet the minimum funding level, there were a lot …read more

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Simon Says Smile, Human!

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The bad news is that when our robot overlords come to oppress us, they’ll be able to tell how well they’re doing just by reading our facial expressions. The good news? Silly computer-vision-enhanced party games!

[Ricardo] wrote up a quickie demonstration, mostly powered by OpenCV and Microsoft’s Emotion API, that scores your ability to mimic emoticon faces. So when you get shown a devil-with-devilish-grin image, you’re supposed to make the same face convincingly enough to fool a neural network classifier. And hilarity ensues!

What’s particularly cool about the game is that [Ricardo] was inspired to write it by reading Hackaday, …read more

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Google Just Made It Way Easier to Scan Your Old Photos

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Using computational photography to bust glare and optimize exposure, the PhotoScan app is a simple and effective way to digitize and archive old photos. The post Google Just Made It Way Easier to Scan Your Old Photos appeared first on WIRED. Continue reading Google Just Made It Way Easier to Scan Your Old Photos→

Protecting Your Home Against Potato Invaders

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Not sure where the potatoes were sneaking in, [24Gospel] did what any decent hacker would do: strapped a camera to a Raspberry Pi, hacked a bit on OpenCV, and built himself a potato detection system. Now those pesky Russets can’t get into the house without tripping the tuber alarm.

OK, seriously. [24Gospel] works for a potato farm as a systems/software developer. (How big does a potato farm have to be to require a dedicated software guy?) His system is still a first step, but the goal is to grade the potatoes, record data about size and defects, and even tell …read more

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Counting Eggs With A Webcam

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You’ll have to dig out your French dictionary (or Google translate) for this one, but it is worth it. [Nicolas Giraud] has been experimenting with ways to use a webcam to detect the number of eggs chickens have laid in a chicken coop. This page documents these experiments using a number of different algorithms to automatically detect the number of eggs and notify the owner. The system is simple, built around a Pi running Debian Jesse Lite and a cheap USB webcam. An LED running off one of the GPIO pins illuminates the eggs, and the camera then captures the …read more

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NASA Knows Where the Meteors Are

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NASA has been tracking bright meteoroids (“fireballs”) using a distributed network of video cameras pointed upwards. And while we usually think of NASA in the context of multi-bazillion dollar rocket ships, but this operation is clearly shoe-string. This is a hack worthy of Hackaday.

The basic idea is that with many wide-angle video cameras capturing the night sky, and a little bit of image processing, identifying meteoroids in the night sky should be fairly easy. When enough cameras capture the same meteoroid, one can use triangulation to back out the path of the meteoroid in 3D, estimate its mass, and …read more

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Hallucinating Machines Generate Tiny Video Clips

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Hallucination is the erroneous perception of something that’s actually absent – or in other words: A possible interpretation of training data. Researchers from the MIT and the UMBC have developed and trained a generative-machine learning model that learns to generate tiny videos at random. The hallucination-like, 64×64 pixels small clips are somewhat plausible, but also a bit spooky.

The machine-learning model behind these artificial clips is capable of learning from unlabeled “in-the-wild” training videos and relies mostly on the temporal coherence of subsequent frames as well as the presence of a static background. It learns to disentangle foreground objects from …read more

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