The Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (SRVC) is a robot scavenger hunt competition that is designed to push the state of the art in image understanding and automatic acquisition of knowledge from large unstructured databases of images (such as those generally found on the web). In this competition, fully autonomous robots receive a text list of objects that they are to find. They use the web to automatically find image examples of those objects in order to learn visual models. These visual models are then used to identify the objects in the robot’s cameras.
The lastest SRVC was hosted at the International Symposium for Visual Computing (ISVC) in Las Vegas Nevada from Nov 31 to Dec 2, 2009. Five individual teams competed this year and hree of the teams brought robots and participated in both the robot and software league. The other two teams participated only in the software league.
The arena was set up with four chairs, three round tables, two tables with drawers, and a small set of stairs for displaying objects. All of the furniture had at least one object for the robots to discover on it, but not all of the objects in the environment were on the list of items for the robots to find.
The crowd was very interested in watching the different robots moving around the environment during their runs. Unfortunately, the robot teams themselves were plagued with various hardware and software integration troubles and only one team was able to find any objects. However, the robot teams that did not perform well demonstrated that their software was very capable of doing the work in a stand-alone mode. The visual classification results from the software league were very impressive.
The official list of objects consisted of:
- pumpkin
- orange
- red ping pong paddle
- white soccer ball
- laptop
- dinosaur
- bottle
- toy car
- frying pan
- book “I am a Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter
- book “Fugitive from the Cubicle Police”
- book “Photoshop in a Nutshell”
- CD “And Winter Came” by Enya
- CD “The Essential Collection” by Karl Jenkins and Adiemus
- DVD “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” widescreen
- game “Call of Duty 4″ box
- toy Domo-kun
- Lay’s Classic Potato Chips
- Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Baked Snack Crackers
- Pepperidge Farm Milano Distinctive Cookies
Objects 5-9 were part of a list of generic objects that were given in advance to the teams. This was in a response to a suggestion from previous years to allow the teams a chance to try to build classifiers that would be capable of recognizing a generic class of objects rather than a very specific one. You can find a full analysis of the results on the SRVC site.
The US Naval Academy entered a robot based on a iRobot Create platform which used a Hokuyo URG LIDAR for navigation and a camera mounted on a mast for ddetecting the objects. This robot was by far the least expensive of the competitors but was still capable of carrying a laptop as well as the other hardware. However, under this load, the robot rapidly drained its batteries but was still able to capture a few images of objects and label them correctly.
Kansas State University entered with a robot based on a MobileRobots Inc. Pioneer 3 platform. They also had a Hokuyo URG LIDAR for navigation and a camera on a mast used for identifying the objects in the environment. This robot was able to traverse most of the environment successfully. Unfortunately, the robot was not able to aim its camera at enough objects to get a chance to correctly identify them.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) robot had by far the most complex setup of all of the robot competitors. They used a MobileRobots Inc. Powerbot that carried four laptops, multiple cameras–including a monocular PowerShot Canon camera, and a Pt. Grey Bumblebee2 stereo camera, and multiple LIDARs both for navigation and object extraction. The team demonstrated several impressive non-scored runs both before and after the event. However, during their officially scored event, the process that ran the primary object detection camera failed and so they were unable to identify any objects.
For more detailed descriptions of the robots, the software, and the computer vision techniques used by these teams, please refer to the team presentations. Each team’s workshop presentation has been posted to that page. Links to their source code will also be posted.
As this contest continues to grow and evolve, the organizers are quite pleased by the progress of the computer vision research that is being demonstrated at these events. This was shown quite handily by the very high scores in the software-only league. However, the organizers would also like to remind the community that this is a robotics competition and thus want to see advances in active vision techniques, intelligent mapping and exploration, and reasoning about where objects are likely to be found (e.g. the “semantics” of the objects). In previous years, most of the robotics competitors took a random-walk approach to exploring the environment where they would hope to cover all of the space and get enough images to see the objects in question. However, the organizers this year were quite pleased to see the previous reigning champions from the University of British Columbia take the robotic exploration aspect of the competition to the next level. The organizers would like to take the time to highlight some of the significant aspects of the UBC team’s approach to how to control their robot.
The UBC team approached the contest in two distinct phases: a mapping phase, and an object identification phase. The strategy of UBC this year was first to navigate the environment and map it using the SICK LIDAR and a SLAM algorithm (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Then the robot would revisit the obstacles in the room and scan them with the Hokuyo LIDAR. Flat horizontal surfaces would be detected in the scans from detection of a few consistent surface normals and a verification stage of the hypothesis of a planar surface. The regions that point out of the plane are interpreted as objects, and 3D bounding are computed from their convex hull (see figure below). This gives a set of candidate locations for the objects. The robot then would revisit these locations to take snapshots and run its object recognition algorithms on these snapshots. Three object recognition methods were implemented, SIFT matching, Contour matching, Deformable Parts Models (DPM). A fourth one using spherical harmonics to recognize 3D data was turned off because it was not quite ready. The DPM approach was trained on the objects known in advance, but could not be used for internet images as it was slightly too slow for that even though it had been rewritten in C.
The organizers were very impressed by the fact that the robot would first identify the specific locations where objects should be found, e.g. the tops of tables and chairs, and then go back and use the 3D sensors to explicitly segment out the locations of the objects to find them. This is exactly the kind of active robotics vision research that we feel will help to push forward the state of the art in real-time computer vision on physical robots and we hope to see more of this kind of approach on future competitors.
To sum up, the research being performed by the teams interested in this competition is extremely impressive. The teams are definitely rising to the challenge put forth by the organizers. Congratulations to all that participated!
By Paul E. Rybski, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University & Daniel DeMenthon, Johns Hopkins University
Let’s say you join a food co-op.
It’s an organic green grocer that slowly adds organic soaps, spices, teas, and meals to its line.
Over time a co-op member comes up with an idea for beeswax candles, another for loofah back sponges, and maybe you add tie-dyed t-shirts to sell at the local festival.
Not only do you spend your money with Hippy Dippy Foods and More, but you invest your time. You help stock the shelves. They give you a discount on your membership, but it’s the community you love.
Now let’s say the board of Hippy Dippy Foods and More sells out to Whole Foods.
Everything will remain the same, they say. We’ll just have more money to make more of the candles and back sponges and t-shirts. We’ll make them a national brand.
OK, you say. I can accept that. I may choose to switch my volunteer times to manning the booth at the festival. I’m proud of my tie-dyed innovation and the candles make great gifts.
Then WalMart buys Whole Foods. And if you protest you’re told to shut up by the local paper. It’s business, you’re told. You don’t own the stock, you have no say. You never really did.
That’s a bit how the community stakeholders at mySQL have felt, watching the project get bought by Sun and, more recently, Oracle. It may be how Zimbra clients feel, watching their software get taken over by Yahoo and, now, VMWare.
It was, let’s put on a show, who’s got a barn? Then, we’re off to Broadway, see you in the funny papers.
Now it’s true that programmers who helped build mySQL and Zimbra don’t own the project. They don’t have a legal claim on the businesses their code built.
But there is such a thing as moral equity. What was us is now you, and you sold out, why shouldn’t I be offended, and why should I trust anyone like you again?
You got my help based on an honest copyleft license, I let myself become dependent on that goodwill, and now I’m supposed to smile because you sold out to the guy I invested so much in you to avoid?
What concerns me in this example is not so much what Oracle or VMWare may do with their asset. It’s what people who have invested time and money in open source communities may now decide to do.
What’s next? Wikipedia bought by the Encyclopedia Brittanica? Firefox gets gobbled by Microsoft?
Legally, the analysts telling mySQL’s community to shut up are saying, yes, it could. And you couldn’t say a thing about it. That’s just capitalism.
It may be, just as Tom Sawyer’s game to get his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence was capitalism. But when Mark Twain wrote that his sympathies weren’t really with Tom. He was satirizing capitalism itself, and telling young readers to be wary of its glib promises.
Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters
Let me warn you up front that Eenie Bounce is not a challenging game. None of its 25 levels took me more than a minute to beat. The object of Eenie Bounce is to bounce your ball around the screen, collecting all the stars and landing on the numbered platforms the appropriate number of times before you hit the ground. Some platforms bounce you higher than others, but that’s the only challenging part. The replay value comes from trying to beat the game in the shortest time possible to get a high score.
Eenie Bounce is more like a puzzle game than a fast-paced game of skill. Once you’ve figured out the pattern that will beat a level, execution is pretty simple. The platforms are large, and the ball moves slowly enough that you should have no trouble pulling off the necessary mid-air maneuvers. Maybe Eenie Bounce isn’t going to keep you awake and playing for days, but it’s not a bad way to kill a lunchbreak.
Eenie Bounce – an easy ball-bouncing Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Puzzle video game – Download Squad – Video game – Games – Score
Go to Source
A quick review of Save MySQL online petition stats shows that the results are still in line with the results I reported previously. Over 90 percent of petition signees would require Oracle to divest MySQL to a “suitable third party.”
Yahoo is weighing its options with its blog-based social network tool MyBlogLog and has not ruled out closing down the site–and its API (our MyBlogLog API profile). When the MyBlogLog API launched, it looked to have a promising future, though this was before Facebook and Google released similar features.
ReadWriteWeb reported that MyBlogLog will be closed in January. Yahoo responded with its own post, which gives few details except to say no decision has been made:
Is a shutdown on the table? Sure, that’s an option. But there are other options as well. We know this creates some uncertainty for current MyBlogLog users. While we aren’t quite ready to share more details, we promise to keep you posted.
If you’re a developer using the MyBlogLog API, it’s difficult to take any solace from the Yahoo post.
If Yahoo does shutter the site and API there will be some fallout. The API never quite saw the adoption to the level of its potential (we list only 5 MyBlogLog mashups, including FOAFster, shown above, and at our profile). However, the MyBlogLog widget, the heart of the service, is still installed on thousands of blogs. Those sites will need to remove MyBlogLog and possibly move to other services. And, the toughest part, they’ll have to start all over with getting visitors to join that next network.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Filed under: Business, Web services, Social Software, Microblogging
Looks like Seesmic is still trying to position itself as the Twitter client that does it all. Loic LeMeur and Co.’s most recent move -buying Ping.fm – will enable Seesmic users to cross-post status updates to 50 different social networks at once. Ping.fm has half a million registered users who post hundreds of thousands of updates a day via the service.
Ping.fm will be fully integrated into Seesmic’s various apps later this month, allowing Seesmic users to instantly post to the networks of their choice. Ping’s SMS, chat and email functions will also become part of Seesmic, and users will be able to set up triggers to automatically post certain updates to specific networks.
Not only has Seesmic bought Ping.fm’s software, it’s also brought on Ping’s team of developers. If anyone can help Seesmic become the all-in-one social networking hub Loic seems to be after, it’s the guys who perfected the scorched-earth approach to telling the world what you had for lunch.
[via Mashable]
Seesmic acquires social network cross-posting service Ping.fm originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Seesmic – Social network – Twitter – Ping.fm – Loïc Le Meur
Go to Source
Those waiting for Samba 4 might have to wait a little longer — but it will be well worth the wait, developers say.
In a team blog posted on Christmas Day, the Samba team announced it will merge the existing Samba 3 backbone services, the file and print server and Winbind identity mapping code, with the Samba 4 Active Directory code.
“Obviously this will require quite a lot of merge work, but we believe this may be possible to achieve in 2010,” the team’s holiday posting announced.
So it sounds like the release date is looking like late 2010 but it could well push into 2011.
The team has never formally announced a date of release for the much anticipated 4 upgrade, but many expected its arrival in the near future.
Samba 4, after all, has been worked on for more than five years and the new Active Directory code is being used in production at some customer sites. Additionally, the Samba 3 Windows NT4 compatible Domain Controller is not being widely deployed because there aren’t many customers that don’t use Active Directory today, the team freely acknowledged on its holiday posting.
So why do it? To ensure compatibility, the team blog said.
“This way people with an existing Samba 3 production product or sites will have a stable and predictable upgrade to the Samba 4 release,” according to a statement on the blog. “Our goal is to keep the code-base stable and minimize the impact of these changes on our users and vendors.”
The integrated product will result in name changes. The Samba 3 file and print server will become the Samba file and print service, the Samba 3 winbindd will be known as the Samba identity service and the Samba 4 Active Directory will be named the Samba Directory service.
There’s much to look forward to in the new version, according to the team blog.
The Samba file server is now fully cluster aware and is currently being extended to include the new SMB2 protocol and full Windows ACL support. “If you want to produce a clustered version of a CIFS file server, check out clustered Samba – it really is the only proven working product out there,” the blog states.
Additionally, Samba plans to release a sample implementation of SMB2 in the forthcoming Samba 3.5.0 update. Microsoft introduced a new version of the CIFS protocol — SMB2 — in Windows 7.
This fall, five Samba4 developers worked hands on with Microsoft developers to enable Windows to establish a trust with a Samba 4 domain. After much work, they were able to demonstrate Samba 4 as a viable option as a peer domain controller in an Active Directory domain. This clearly shows the advanced nature of Active Directory support in Samba 4.
“This was the first time that Samba4 had hosted an AD domain that a Windows DC found sufficiently acceptable to replicate the whole directory, and be comfortable to set itself up as a peer domain controller,” wrote Samba developer Andrew Bartlett in an October 2009 blog shortly after the demonstration. Samba 4 will be “able to host such domains alone or in partnership with Microsoft’s Windows.”
Of course, it will take time to merge the Samba code bases and iron out all of the Microsoft compatibility issues before release. But the team won’t ship the Samba 4 code until it is ready.
“Once we have a merged code-base, we’ll declare victory, ship Samba4 and have the biggest darn release party since Duke Nukem Forever shipped and revolutionized computer gaming,” the team quips on the blog.
Meanwhile, the Samba team announced that it will move to a more predictable release schedule this year. The next version is Samba 3.5 and updates will follow every six months, the team promised.
Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters
I think this one might rank as the easiest Time-Waster I’ve ever reviewed — even I managed to finish it in just five minutes! Where is 2010? is a quaint little platformer game. You jump around, flip switches and… that’s about it really. Eventually you find ’2010′ and the game finishes. This one’s more about the ride — the artistic vision – than the actual gameplay.
You only need to know two things that might trip you up: a) You can jump from one platform to another platform on a different screen, and b) You can climb back up the wall using the sticky-outy bricks (it doesn’t make sense now, but it’ll make sense to you later when you get stuck… like me…)
Casual Gameplay suggests that this is a precursor to a bigger game, DayMare Town 3. It would make sense that this is a trailer or teaser: the artistic style is unique, very well done. Where is 2010? is way, way beyond what you’d expect in a simple jump-around-and-hit-levers game.
Incidentally, if you haven’t played the DayMare series, you really should.
Where is 2010? Cutesy (but a little creepy) Time-Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
game – Video game – Download Squad – Platform game – Action
Go to Source
Florian Mueller began 2010 by demonstrating why he was named EU Campaigner of the Year by the Economist magazine five years ago. While most of us were prepping for New Year’s Eve celebrations or contemplating New Year’s resolutions, Mueller and MySQL co-founder and creator Michael “Monty” Widenius spent Dec. 28 launching an online Save MySQL petition against the Oracle acquisition of MySQL via Sun. Mueller reports via e-mail:
The site claims a “huge collection of hit lyrics.” Your next music application can tap into the database with the new ChartLyrics Lyric API. You can use it to search in several ways and, more importantly, obtain the text that makes up the words to popular songs.
Though the documentation seems to push a SOAP API, an easier to use REST-based interface is also available for every operation. That means you can test out the API in your browser to see if it will work for you.
The service has three functions:
- SearchLyric – returns songs by artist, song title, or both.
- SearchLyricText – returns songs with lyrics that match the search term
- GetLyric – returns the actual lyrics to the song — called after one of the other functions
Since the lyrics are shared by individual users, ChartLyrics also provides a link to provide corrections. As per the community-based nature of the site, it requests developers encourage their users to report problems with lyrics to improve the database.
Music APIs remain popular. About five percent of all mashups are tagged music. We also list 66 music APIs, including two ChartLyrics competitors: Lyricsfly and LyricWiki. 2009 saw several Music Hack Day events where developers got together to discuss and improve platforms, as well as create applications (we covered the London Music Hack Day and the Boston Music Hack Day) .
As with many music-related applications, copyright issues are a major consideration. Hit songwriters are well-compensated and, as such, well-defended. Just a few months ago, LyricWiki stopped sharing lyrics via its API because of licensing issues.
Still, the lyrics APIs remain popular with developers. We list 43 lyrics mashups, almost double the number at the beginning of 2009.