Last month: Came down with the plague (flu), and bought a house. No response yet from Google/Shahram Izadi regarding the PerceptiveIO team.

Today: Nudged the Google contact. Looked into what's being used these days for 3D scanning on animals. Namely the work on Digital Life 3D is very cool, even if its using standard cameras (high res though!). There are also CT scans being done by the "Fish Guy". Minor outline updates for the survey paper. Read more...

Yester...year: Not dead yet. And the paper has been successfully submitted to PAMI. An Intel R435 has been acquired for additional testing and experimentation. Faramarz and I have both connected with Google/Shahram Izadi of the PerceptiveIO team (did you notice their webpage has expired, eh?) in the last week, and no response yet.

Today: Re-organized workspace on campus, got caught up in where I'm at and what I'm up to with the survey paper. Updating to Windows 10 (or maybe just updating within Windows 7...) Read more...

Twenty-two (22) items left to address in the paper edits. Some involve creating figures. Lets see how quickly we can knock them off and move onto the next exciting paper!

Yesterday: (Last two weeks). Struggled wtih this website. It seems PmWiki has updated likely broken the use of Blog-It for posting. (Issues with formatting, and unable to associate with the blog it groups - via missing post controls).

Took time to go over Faramarz's feedback from the draft document of last fall. There are a lot of things that will need to be re-worked in whatever form it takes next. Started part-time work, and had bereavement issues last week.

Aliasing Issues
My drawers PCD Dataset

No Aliasing Issues!
My drawers PCD Dataset

(Yesterday) Finally worked out the issues causing aliasing on my in-house examples when loaded into SiftFu. Wasn't creating the depth files correctly. They appear to be accurate now, and generate better images. The stationary parts of the scene are not as smooth as desired, but this may be due to the dynamic nature of the in-house examples.

Today: Look at incorporating rigid feature labels for constructing volumetric representation in SiftFu. Visualize the results of this for the different groupings selected. Will need to look at extracting codebase from Matlab, or incorporating a GPU implementation for speed ups (its is awfully slow); as well as RGB colouring of results. Read more...

Yesterday: (Last term and a half). Was tasked with formally writing up the unsuccessful results mid-summer. Summer vacation. Continued writing through the fall, submitting a starter-draft midway through. Numerous suggestions for revisions, though the dominate question is what specifically should be described. Requiring better results before an improved iteration. Reached out (December) to researcher Barnes in Australia who has had success with similar work through student Perera, but have yet to hear back on possible collaborations, discussion or testing validation.

Was a sessional instructor for CPSC453 - Introduction to Computer Graphics during Fall 2015, managing 3 TAs and 75 students. While an amazing opportunity and incredibly motivating and inspiring for computer graphics, it was very time consuming (attempting to teach well, organizing and creating lecture material, re-working existing materials, organizing and updating assignments, creating and grading exams).

Today: (And last couple of days) After winter break, have been re-visiting where I am in the code base, and what needs to be updated/corrected to improve results. Overall todos:

• Improving visuals through KinFu integration - variant of Barnes/Perera's 2014 work
• Supporting NaN values for feature points (ie. spatially or temporally occluded) - consider modern tracking methods?
• Improve speeds (GPU, parallelization, use of transformations, dynamic/adaptive feature tracking based on success/structure?)
• Joint network determination
• Improved test cases

I've taken on a temporary part-time contract with a great software company downtown for the coming term. An artificial deadline for April has been set for evaluation of PhD progress for future directions.Read more...

Yesterday: (Wrote it up yesterday).

Today: Added support for NaN values (ie. when feature points aren't always visible). Created test cases where feature points are visible 80% of the frames (5 frames)

7 Features 80% Vis
My 3books PCD Dataset

7 Features 100% Vis
My 3books PCD Dataset

SURF Only 100% Vis
My 3books PCD Dataset

Read more...

Yesterday: Generated a few PCD examples, including one with moving antlers, 3 moving books and books "moving" in 3D. Had issues with insufficient feature points being detected.

Today: Incorporated support for blending multiple types of feature point into a single tracking for frames. Also added support to have the series keep keypoints that are occasionally hidden (based on percentage of frames, but could be otherwise). NaN values are inserted when they are not present. This can increase the number of keypoints by three-fold. Need to add support within rigid object segmentation for these NaN values. Also, it appears there are already point tracking algorithms, which I might want to look into. Moving antlers still aren't detected, but might with NaN values...Read more...

Yesterday: (Last couple days) Struggled with getting PCL, boost, etc. to all work so that I can capture PCD files for use. Played with Ubuntu, Matlab, Windows set ups, with no easy results. Bugs with saving RGB colours on Matlab. Boost permissions issue with SD card storage on Ubuntu. Incorrect/corrupt dlls on Windows (XnCore, XnDDK).

Reference letter sent off. Sent off request for references from supervisors for CPSC453 instruction. Added a bit more math to adjacency matrix description within the report. Need to include visual explanations.

Today: Success on PCDs loading! (Ubuntu install). Will spend the rest of the day seeing how the feature points get extracted and 3D results. Submitted CPSC453 instructor application documents. Read more...

Yesterday: (Last few days) Was able to get examples from Perera et al. to load, including visualizing their clustered results within my program. Able to load in pcd files and convert them to matrices for use by the program (saves only features that are always visible consistent with Perera et al's approach - ie. NaN values TBD). In turn, able to load this into my own program for clustering, etc. Good visual results, though low feature points extracted and only for few frames. Able to render point clouds and overlay feature points. Had an issue with the feature points overlay order (SortMethod depth vs childorder) in Matlab, which was resolved with a little guidance.

Attempting to get additional tests cases for better examples, but the helper functions built 2 years ago no longer work - updating libraries, etc. to get functional.

Submitted AITF report. Accepted for teaching CPSC453 conditional on formal application. Request for reference letter from undergraduate course. Request for formal report describing work to-date.

Today: Spent the last two days and today getting PCL and Boost libraries to work on Ubuntu with cmake. Finicky thing but finally seem to be able to get it compiling. Need to test that it will register the Kinect and attempt to generate new samples. Read more...

Yesterday: Developed a conversion tool for pcd to matlab style matrices, including feature point detection (SIFT - could be other), matching, comparison against prior list with position updating or appending. Issue with handling duplicate matches. Will need to adjust system to support NaN vertices (ie. ones that are not visible either via kinect occlusion, or not visible in the scene); possibly tie in better with processing to use location estimates to search for subsequently matching features.

Today: Spent the whole day writing up final report for AITF scholarship. Was able to adapt from project proposal as well as scholarship application summary; good to have list tracking key accomplishments within a given year. While I'm not superwoman, I did accomplish things. Needing to get it written up though... Read more...