Hi All
I get questions once in a while about this blog and just to let you know that I have ceased to update the blog. It will be left here to help others who may one day walk along the path of OpenCV and OSX and hopefully some of my past experiences can help you solve your problems and/or inspire you.
Happy New Year!
Thank you, and congratulations to Kevin :)
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Setting up Lightdraw
JL hinted me on this before he got enlisted - the set up behind the Lightdraw application. Look at how easy and convenient it is!
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Lighting the next draw...
Lightdraw has progressed for quite a bit since we last left IHPC. The project is in good hands with Kevin, Cheng Teng and Situ Yi at the forefront of its development.
Over the past few days, Lightdraw has received quite a bit of attention. Let's see where Lightdraw has gone:
Polytechnic Student Research Programme , Best Project Award Presentation Ceremony
I have received no official description about this event, so let me put it in simple terms: The PSRP is a program where all five polytechnics will choose their top two research projects and have the students to present them at the Award Presentation Ceremony. Lightdraw was selected to represent Temasek Polytechnic for the year 2008. In this year, only three polytechnics participated, namely, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic.
The guest of honor for this event is Mr Boon Swan Foo, Executive Chairman for Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd, Chairman for Technology Transfer Network and Managing Director of Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Below are two pictures taken from the invitation book, with Lightdraw highlighted with a red rectangle overlay (in the second picture).
This event was also covered by Channel News Asia and was mentioned during the news broadcast as well as on its website (http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/334218/1/.html). If the link does not work, you can refer to the picture below of a scanned printed version.
Temasek Informatics & IT School Project Show 2008 + Lianhe Wanbao
Lightdraw was also showcased at Temasek Informatics & IT School's Project Show. It was categorized under the "IT @ Work" category (the other two were IT @ Play and IT @ Home). This is the first project in the booklet given to all guest and industry partners who attended the Project Show. For this demonstration, we were given an enclosed room to set up and show Lightdraw. Some of the more exciting challenges in doing this were:
Below is a project write up of Lightdraw, in the booklet given to all guests.
On the same morning as the Project Show, a reporter from Lianhe Wanbao (a chinese newspaper) had a short phone interview with us. An article about Lightdraw came out the very same day in the evening copy of Lianhe Wanbao. The scanned version is below:
V-Camp
I was informed that Lightdraw Game: Whackapeng, was used in this community event. The kids who came down to IHPC had a great time playing the simple game of encircling two game pieces (or what they call "pengs") with ordinary everyday devices, such as torchlights and hand phones.
Lightdraw Video II
ASTAR Institute of High Performance Computing released a second video of Lightdraw onto YouTube on March 13, 2008. As of this blog post, it has gathered 28 views so far. The second video (or first public video) consists of newer video footage such as Whackapeng and Laser Window Manipulation. It also retained some previous functionality footage from the first cut. Without further ado, here is the video:
This is Lightdraw's 15 minutes (or more?) of fame. Hopefully, there will be much more in the future to increase the awareness of the existence of such a cool project.
Over the past few days, Lightdraw has received quite a bit of attention. Let's see where Lightdraw has gone:
Polytechnic Student Research Programme , Best Project Award Presentation Ceremony
I have received no official description about this event, so let me put it in simple terms: The PSRP is a program where all five polytechnics will choose their top two research projects and have the students to present them at the Award Presentation Ceremony. Lightdraw was selected to represent Temasek Polytechnic for the year 2008. In this year, only three polytechnics participated, namely, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic.
The guest of honor for this event is Mr Boon Swan Foo, Executive Chairman for Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd, Chairman for Technology Transfer Network and Managing Director of Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Below are two pictures taken from the invitation book, with Lightdraw highlighted with a red rectangle overlay (in the second picture).
This event was also covered by Channel News Asia and was mentioned during the news broadcast as well as on its website (http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/334218/1/.html). If the link does not work, you can refer to the picture below of a scanned printed version.
Temasek Informatics & IT School Project Show 2008 + Lianhe Wanbao
Lightdraw was also showcased at Temasek Informatics & IT School's Project Show. It was categorized under the "IT @ Work" category (the other two were IT @ Play and IT @ Home). This is the first project in the booklet given to all guest and industry partners who attended the Project Show. For this demonstration, we were given an enclosed room to set up and show Lightdraw. Some of the more exciting challenges in doing this were:
- Wall Reflection - As the room walls were white, they tend to reflect an awful amount of light
- Webcam Compatibility - We had difficulty in finding the right camera to use for Lightdraw on Ubuntu
Below is a project write up of Lightdraw, in the booklet given to all guests.
On the same morning as the Project Show, a reporter from Lianhe Wanbao (a chinese newspaper) had a short phone interview with us. An article about Lightdraw came out the very same day in the evening copy of Lianhe Wanbao. The scanned version is below:
V-Camp
I was informed that Lightdraw Game: Whackapeng, was used in this community event. The kids who came down to IHPC had a great time playing the simple game of encircling two game pieces (or what they call "pengs") with ordinary everyday devices, such as torchlights and hand phones.
Lightdraw Video II
ASTAR Institute of High Performance Computing released a second video of Lightdraw onto YouTube on March 13, 2008. As of this blog post, it has gathered 28 views so far. The second video (or first public video) consists of newer video footage such as Whackapeng and Laser Window Manipulation. It also retained some previous functionality footage from the first cut. Without further ado, here is the video:
This is Lightdraw's 15 minutes (or more?) of fame. Hopefully, there will be much more in the future to increase the awareness of the existence of such a cool project.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Week 16 (4 Feb - 8 Feb)
Monday, 4 February 2008
We have been informed of a final presentation tomorrow to the Visualization department of AC, as well as anyone interested to attend.
We started working on the slides in the afternoon, as well as on the new Lightdraw video - but we discovered, though quite late into the recording, that the software used to record the video has expired its trial period. We tried to use another freeware program, but it seemed to hang whenever it started to encode the video.
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
In the morning was our presentation to the visualization group in the AC department. After which, was lunch at a nice French restaurant around Holland Village, attended by Harold, Bernard, Cheng Teng, Situ Yi and Kevin.
After lunch, its clearing time. Cleared up room, desktop and laptop that I used for the past 16 weeks. Finally finished the report rewriting and hopefully it is better than what I had written previously. Although I know that it is nowhere near perfect, but I am determined to keep on reading and learning from other reports, extending my vocabulary and correcting my grammar to strive for perfection.
Also handed in my February Time Sheet and RFID pass to HR. Within a short time span, 16 weeks in IHPC have passed and this marks the end of my internship stint here. Within these period, many things have happened and compared to the time when we first walked in the doors of IHPC, we are now leaving it being much wiser and knowledgeable. All this is possible to everyone at IHPC who have made this internship much more enriching and entertaining. I truly enjoyed working at IHPC for my internship.
Our paths have criss-crossed and traveled parallel to each other's for the past 16 weeks. But now, our paths gradually diverge.
Till our paths cross again!
Other than that, I will definitely miss the COVE and the Wii times.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
New Year's Eve, there is no work today.
Thursday, 7 February 2008
Chinese New Year! Today is a public holiday and thus, there is no work.
Friday, 8 February 2008
Chinese New Year! Today is a public holiday and thus, there is no work.
Reflection of the Week:
The end of 16 weeks is pretty fast.
As long as we live and learn with an open mind and accept everyone for who they are, stay humble and learn from others, we will pick up many things beneficial to us, both hard and soft skills. It makes us realize how fast life is passing us by and how to make full use of it.
Working in a research environment has helped me gain and hone my problem solving skills as well. To quote Dr Eng: "There's always a line between industry projects and research projects. In research, you never stop asking yourself 'can't I do better than this?' that's how breakthrough in research is achieved."
He has hit the nail right on its head. We always get too caught up with the specifications and datelines that we fail to venture out of the normal line of work and ask ourselves: what can I do to make this function perform better? How can I make the data in the database reusable across many applications? And other questions that help lead the way to innovative and effective ways of performing the same tasks.
Trying and developing new things that are out of the ordinary and common path is no doubt challenging and exciting. I really hope to see the real full fledged version of Lightdraw in action one day. :)
We have been informed of a final presentation tomorrow to the Visualization department of AC, as well as anyone interested to attend.
We started working on the slides in the afternoon, as well as on the new Lightdraw video - but we discovered, though quite late into the recording, that the software used to record the video has expired its trial period. We tried to use another freeware program, but it seemed to hang whenever it started to encode the video.
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
In the morning was our presentation to the visualization group in the AC department. After which, was lunch at a nice French restaurant around Holland Village, attended by Harold, Bernard, Cheng Teng, Situ Yi and Kevin.
After lunch, its clearing time. Cleared up room, desktop and laptop that I used for the past 16 weeks. Finally finished the report rewriting and hopefully it is better than what I had written previously. Although I know that it is nowhere near perfect, but I am determined to keep on reading and learning from other reports, extending my vocabulary and correcting my grammar to strive for perfection.
Also handed in my February Time Sheet and RFID pass to HR. Within a short time span, 16 weeks in IHPC have passed and this marks the end of my internship stint here. Within these period, many things have happened and compared to the time when we first walked in the doors of IHPC, we are now leaving it being much wiser and knowledgeable. All this is possible to everyone at IHPC who have made this internship much more enriching and entertaining. I truly enjoyed working at IHPC for my internship.
Our paths have criss-crossed and traveled parallel to each other's for the past 16 weeks. But now, our paths gradually diverge.
Till our paths cross again!
Other than that, I will definitely miss the COVE and the Wii times.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
New Year's Eve, there is no work today.
Thursday, 7 February 2008
Chinese New Year! Today is a public holiday and thus, there is no work.
Friday, 8 February 2008
Chinese New Year! Today is a public holiday and thus, there is no work.
Reflection of the Week:
The end of 16 weeks is pretty fast.
As long as we live and learn with an open mind and accept everyone for who they are, stay humble and learn from others, we will pick up many things beneficial to us, both hard and soft skills. It makes us realize how fast life is passing us by and how to make full use of it.
Working in a research environment has helped me gain and hone my problem solving skills as well. To quote Dr Eng: "There's always a line between industry projects and research projects. In research, you never stop asking yourself 'can't I do better than this?' that's how breakthrough in research is achieved."
He has hit the nail right on its head. We always get too caught up with the specifications and datelines that we fail to venture out of the normal line of work and ask ourselves: what can I do to make this function perform better? How can I make the data in the database reusable across many applications? And other questions that help lead the way to innovative and effective ways of performing the same tasks.
Trying and developing new things that are out of the ordinary and common path is no doubt challenging and exciting. I really hope to see the real full fledged version of Lightdraw in action one day. :)
If whatever is fun isn't tiring, would we ever stop doing it?
The lesser the routine, the more the life.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Week 15 (28 Jan - 1 Feb)
Monday, 28 January 2008
Morning was spent dedicated to adding methods to our class diagram for the Lightdraw controller and DisplayManager. The libraries were left alone for the time being as they are the easiest to do (as the Lightdraw controller would just pass on calls to it).
Another thing that was discussed was how to allow a developer to make use of the plug-in architecture to write his/her own menu and add it to the Lightdraw package.
In the afternoon, focused on improving vertex detection by enforcing the light to be within a certain range from the initial point instead of just any where in the square (think resize range + draw implementation) and helped JL to improve the original Lightdraw code to implement the similar feature in it.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Mucked around with creating a custom structuring element in an attempt to apply a structuring element to the morphological thinning. Learnt quite a few new things like how structuring elements work, how its grid size works, etc.
I also found something new today: 509 Error is a "bandwidth exceeded" error returned from the server.
Anyway, just side track a bit, I found this very interesting post on the yahoo group. Please note that this is not posted by me, and the author is at the bottom of the post.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
The learning point for today is to spend some time to write proper reports. Why do I say so?
It was something that Kevin said that made me thinking back to my mid semester presentation on Lightdraw and a lecture in school (I think it was SSM) ponder about it.
There are already many developers out in the industry working for years now and given their technical skills, they make excellent developers for various projects. However, why do some of them get stuck in the development sector, being unable to move on to more important jobs like a project manager or a sales engineer?
Well, I believe that the answer has got to do with reports and presentations. Someone once said - "A good software system is nothing if no one wants to use it". Which is pretty true - if the sales and marketing team or project manager is unable to convince (potential) stakeholders on investing or using the software system, it will just be another white elephant (no pun intended) shelved away.
Reports and presentations are important to bring across the messages and ideas which one might have. It also has the power to convince the listener on why he should invest his time and money into the project or system. I guess we cannot run away from the fact that our IT systems will be used by business and thus need a solid business plan to accompany it.
Kind of reminds me on Imagine Cup last year, where although the software system may be the best there may be, without being able to articulate our advantages across will mean nothing to the judges.
And now, its back to my report.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Nothing much to talk about for today for no actual development work took place. It is more about the report and OO design of Lightdraw. For the OO Design, we contemplated of having signals and slots structures managed by an event handler, and the discussion of whether we needed it or not.
Friday, 1 February 2008
Today is spent in school at the career fair.
Oh well.
Reflection of the Week:
I was at career fair on Friday and took a look around at the various booths of potential employers as well as the booths of universities. I also attended various talks about potential job applications from employers, such as PA, CAAS and Thatz, and University talks by NUS, SMU and NTU.
I also met one of my previous math tuition friends, Charlene. And we recalled the last time that we were back at our tutor's place being referenced by the format (school name) (secondary level) (boy or girl) (any other info e.g. tall). The arriving in our school uniforms every afternoon with our other barang2 at 2.30pm or 4pm and doing our questions through the afternoon silently, only asking our tutor when we needed help.
Later that day over dinner, I was amazed with how fast time flies. I can still remember myself at orientation back in 2005, the first time meeting my care person, my Alice project (first project in polytechnic) and JPetWorld. In fact, all the way back to my maths tuition teacher's house (even before polytechnic days) - pouring over the questions and working out the answers absentmindedly.
3 years later, I'm now at the end of my polytechnic education, thinking of which university to apply for. What happened during these 3 years? Well, the answer to that would include the juggling of my various commitments, projects, events, getting to know more people over time and making new friends across TP's 5 faculties, and many others. It is very shocking, daunting yet exciting that in May, we would graduate from a place we called school (or for some, home) for the last 3 years and move out into a broader playing field full of opportunities and new experiences.
Time waits for no man. It is what we make out of it.
Morning was spent dedicated to adding methods to our class diagram for the Lightdraw controller and DisplayManager. The libraries were left alone for the time being as they are the easiest to do (as the Lightdraw controller would just pass on calls to it).
Another thing that was discussed was how to allow a developer to make use of the plug-in architecture to write his/her own menu and add it to the Lightdraw package.
In the afternoon, focused on improving vertex detection by enforcing the light to be within a certain range from the initial point instead of just any where in the square (think resize range + draw implementation) and helped JL to improve the original Lightdraw code to implement the similar feature in it.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Mucked around with creating a custom structuring element in an attempt to apply a structuring element to the morphological thinning. Learnt quite a few new things like how structuring elements work, how its grid size works, etc.
I also found something new today: 509 Error is a "bandwidth exceeded" error returned from the server.
Anyway, just side track a bit, I found this very interesting post on the yahoo group. Please note that this is not posted by me, and the author is at the bottom of the post.
You can use "cvGetSeqElem" function..
This is my simple example of finding center point of contour.
------------------------
CvPoint pt[CLENGTH_MAX],center={0,0},ptk={0,0};
cont_no = cvFindContours( segbw, storage, &contour, sizeof
(CvContour),CV_RETR_EXTERNAL, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_NONE);
for( ; contour != 0; contour = contour->h_next )
{
CvSeq* result = contour;
for(i=0; itotal; i++)
{
pt[i] = *(CvPoint*)cvGetSeqElem( result, i );
//printf("%d %d : %d\n", pt[i].x, pt[i].y, result->total);
center.x += pt[i].x;
center.y += pt[i].y;
}
center.x /= result->total;
center.y /= result->total;
:
:
}
------------------------
Good Luck!
Tommy Kim.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
The learning point for today is to spend some time to write proper reports. Why do I say so?
It was something that Kevin said that made me thinking back to my mid semester presentation on Lightdraw and a lecture in school (I think it was SSM) ponder about it.
There are already many developers out in the industry working for years now and given their technical skills, they make excellent developers for various projects. However, why do some of them get stuck in the development sector, being unable to move on to more important jobs like a project manager or a sales engineer?
Well, I believe that the answer has got to do with reports and presentations. Someone once said - "A good software system is nothing if no one wants to use it". Which is pretty true - if the sales and marketing team or project manager is unable to convince (potential) stakeholders on investing or using the software system, it will just be another white elephant (no pun intended) shelved away.
Reports and presentations are important to bring across the messages and ideas which one might have. It also has the power to convince the listener on why he should invest his time and money into the project or system. I guess we cannot run away from the fact that our IT systems will be used by business and thus need a solid business plan to accompany it.
Kind of reminds me on Imagine Cup last year, where although the software system may be the best there may be, without being able to articulate our advantages across will mean nothing to the judges.
And now, its back to my report.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Nothing much to talk about for today for no actual development work took place. It is more about the report and OO design of Lightdraw. For the OO Design, we contemplated of having signals and slots structures managed by an event handler, and the discussion of whether we needed it or not.
Friday, 1 February 2008
Today is spent in school at the career fair.
Oh well.
Reflection of the Week:
I was at career fair on Friday and took a look around at the various booths of potential employers as well as the booths of universities. I also attended various talks about potential job applications from employers, such as PA, CAAS and Thatz, and University talks by NUS, SMU and NTU.
I also met one of my previous math tuition friends, Charlene. And we recalled the last time that we were back at our tutor's place being referenced by the format (school name) (secondary level) (boy or girl) (any other info e.g. tall). The arriving in our school uniforms every afternoon with our other barang2 at 2.30pm or 4pm and doing our questions through the afternoon silently, only asking our tutor when we needed help.
Later that day over dinner, I was amazed with how fast time flies. I can still remember myself at orientation back in 2005, the first time meeting my care person, my Alice project (first project in polytechnic) and JPetWorld. In fact, all the way back to my maths tuition teacher's house (even before polytechnic days) - pouring over the questions and working out the answers absentmindedly.
3 years later, I'm now at the end of my polytechnic education, thinking of which university to apply for. What happened during these 3 years? Well, the answer to that would include the juggling of my various commitments, projects, events, getting to know more people over time and making new friends across TP's 5 faculties, and many others. It is very shocking, daunting yet exciting that in May, we would graduate from a place we called school (or for some, home) for the last 3 years and move out into a broader playing field full of opportunities and new experiences.
Time waits for no man. It is what we make out of it.
Once again, we put another chapter behind us and move on to the next, bringing with us the progress of the storyline and its characters. At the end of each chapter, we are just a fraction closer to the end of the book.
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