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Posts Tagged ‘cameras’

The algorithm was developed by Zdenek Kalal, a PhD student at the University of Surrey in England, who we can see rolling around on his desk chair in this video demonstration of the camera’s tracking abilities. After selecting something for Predator to focus on with a bounding box, the system begins recognizing patterns, learning how that object looks at different distances and angles, and even finding it amongst a sea of similar objects. When Kalal tells Predator to track his face, it is able to pick him out of a page full of small photos of other people.

Kalal does an excellent job of explaining the potential uses for the technology, moving beyond the obvious implications for security and identifying criminals. The video demonstrates how you can use the algorithm to track animals, stabilize videos by focusing on one object, or even create a makeshift mouse as the system tracks your fingers.

[University of Surrey via Wired]

Microsoft researchers used PhotoSynth technology to build the app, but it goes beyond that photo-stitching program and also calculates the depth of an object. The model determines the camera’s location in space and determines the depth. You don’t have to worry about capturing perfectly overlapping panoramas — the software can smooth it all out, as Microsoft researcher Johannes Kopf explains to Technology Review.

The software preserves straight lines and eliminates holes and weird triangular gaps, a common problem in 3-D stitching.

To make a model, you would walk around an object, snapping overlapping pictures from different angles. Upload them to a server for processing, and the app downloads a 3-D model that you can grab and spin on your phone’s touchscreen. It recreates your view as you walked around, allowing you to see the object from every angle. Technology Review explains in further detail.

This could be useful for selling items online, among a myriad other uses. The app uses much less bandwidth than a 3-D video would, because it only needs a few images.

The project was developed at Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media group.

[Technology Review]

So far, there are only three cameras, but astronomers hope to add a dozen more in schools and science centers, eventually broadening the All-Sky Fireball Network to the entire country. The system consists of smart black-and-white cameras that record the entire night sky, fish-eye-like.

Computer programs triangulate the meteors’ paths.

Every day, about 100 tons of space rock fragments enter Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA. If meteor-hunters could tell where the rocks land and where they came from, they could go pick them up and study them as if it were a free sample return mission — no round-trip space probes required, according to William Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

“When we collect the meteorite chunks, we'll know their source. I could be holding a piece of Vesta in my hand,” he told NASA Science News.

Granted, most rocks will never be found, plunking into the ocean, forests or other unreachable areas. But the calculations could determine meteor speed as a function of size, which could help spacecraft designers build meteor-resistant skins.

The automated system detects meteors streaking across the sky, and records images and video along with data analysis of their trajectories. The data is updated every morning at 8 a.m. central time, and three weeks’ worth of data is available online through NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

One camera is in Huntsville, Ala., another is in Chickamauga, Ga., and the third is in Tullahoma, Tenn., covering a broad swath of the southern U.S. “Nothing will burn up in those skies without me knowing about it,” Cooke told NASA Science News.

The next dozen or so cameras will be located east of the Mississippi, but Cooke plans to add more throughout the country. Here’s hoping for some cameras covering southern Nevada.

[via Singularity Hub]

Endoscopy involves inserting a cable with a camera lens on it through your body’s natural openings or through small incisions, so doctors can check out internal organs, examine injuries or perform surgery. But endoscopes are complex to produce, requiring complex silicon wafer etching, which means they’re expensive. They also must be carefully sanitized with each use, which is time-consuming.

The new model, designed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin, is so cheap that it could be tossed out with the doctor’s latex gloves.

It’s possible with a new fabrication method that simplifies the wiring of the image sensors, according to a Fraunhofer news release. Typical endoscopic cameras consist of a lens at one end and a sensor at the other, but this one is self-contained, as Gizmag further explains. The camera has a resolution of 62,500 pixels and transmits images through an electrical cable.

It’s just one cubic millimeter in size, which the researchers say is the smallest camera known.

Along with medical applications, endoscopes are used in bomb disposal and in the construction industry. The automotive industry is apparently interested in this new one, according to Fraunhofer — the tiny cameras could be used to replace outside rear-view mirrors, improving cars’ aerodynamics, or they could be installed to monitor drivers’ eye movements to make sure they’re paying attention to the road.

The German image sensor firm Awaiba GmbH developed the tiny endoscope with Fraunhofer Labs, and its owner hopes to commercialize the technology by next year.

[Fraunhofer via Gizmag]

The idea behind the software was to eliminate the need for other, more physical forms of tracking, like RFID (or, in the future, RFID's more powerful brother, NFC), but using artificial intelligence to supplement mid- or even low-end cameras. Simply recognizing a face from a security camera is no joke--people can look vastly different day to day, and there are all kinds of variables (angle, lighting, clothing, posture) that can throw off the effectiveness of that kind of software. But what if said software could make certain rational assumptions?

This system requires cameras--though not necessarily top-of-the-line cameras--be placed at building entrances or exits, a place where they can capture with reasonable quality a person's face, height, or gait. That information is fed to a central computer, which notes not only the appearance of that person but also their location. From there, the central computer cross-checks that person's scan with all the others currently in the building, thereby eliminating some of the troublesome variables. If Dr. ScrubStealer is in the supply closet on the fifth floor, she couldn't possibly also be the similar-looking Nurse SleepsALot, who is down in the second-floor lounge, napping in the middle of her shift.

That further reasoning allows the system to identify people with much higher accuracy than other systems using low-quality cameras, which can be a boon for struggling hospitals (hospitals being one of the prime candidates for the system) that are unable to pay for pricey HD security loops. The only possible foil: Twins.

[SUNY Buffalo]

Although many people he has encountered have questioned the wisdom of his decision (he has to sleep sitting up), Bilal says it only hints at how our gadgets and bodies will meld in the future. He hopes this project will call attention to the constant state of surveillance that has already become the socially accepted norm, but he does cap the lens upon request. “I wanted a way to capture the moments of life that we don’t pay attention to,” he says.

NOTE: Professor Bilal's body rejected the implanted camera in early February, and had to have part of the apparatus removed.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute embedded drops of ferrofluid, a liquid infused with magnetic nanoparticles, into a thin substrate that was submerged in water. Then they exposed the device to a magnetic field to make one of the droplets vibrate back and forth (up or down in the image above), which caused its partner to oscillate in a mirror pattern. This ballet displaces teeny amounts of liquid, moving it from one chamber to another, according to Amir H. Hirsa, a mechanical engineering professor at Rensselaer. The piston is superfast, allowing micro-scale devices with cycling speeds in the kilohertz range.

The liquid piston has no moving mechanical pieces, so it never suffers wear and tear, according to a Rensselaer news release. The droplet duo could be used in a wide array of devices that require reliable resonator action, like an implantable chip that slowly pumps drugs from one chamber to another, Hirsa said.

What’s more, the droplets’ shape constantly changes as they vibrate, so if you pass light through them, they function as a lens that automatically changes its focal length. Hirsa and colleagues took some video from these liquid lenses and they say its quality is comparable to a typical computer web cam. You would need special software to filter out the blurry frames, but Hirsa says it could work for handheld electronic devices as well as potential replacement eye lenses. So instead of a cool pair of frames, you could wear magnets on your head to fine-tune your vision.

Other nanoresonators we’ve seen involve trapping light at different wavelengths to produce a high-definition display. This device would instead focus light to obtain a sharp picture.

The droplets’ speed and vibration strength can be controlled by changing the strength of the magnetic field, according to Rensselaer.

The liquid piston is described in the journal Lab on a Chip.

[Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]