Development, Education

3D Display Simulation using Head-Tracking with Kinect

During my final year in Cambridge I had the opportunity to work on the project that I wanted to implement for the last three years: a glasses-free 3D display.

1. Introduction

It all started when I saw Johnny Lee's "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote" project in early 2008 (see below). He cunningly used the infrared camera in the Nintendo Wii's remote and a head mounted sensor bar to track the location of the viewer's head and render view dependent images on the screen. He called it a "portal to the virtual environment".

I always thought that it would be really cool to have this behaviour without having to wear anything on your head (and it was - see the video below!).

My "portal to the virtual environment" which does not require head gear. And it has 3D Tetris!

I am a firm believer in three-dimensional displays, and I am certain that we do not see the widespread adoption of 3D displays simply because of a classic network effect (also know as "chicken-and-egg" problem). The creation and distribution of a three-dimensional content is inevitably much more expensive than a regular, old-school 2D content. If there is no demand (i.e. no one has a 3D display at home/work), then the content providers do not have much of an incentive to bother creating the 3D content. Vice versa, if there is no content then consumers do not see much incentive to invest in (inevitably more expensive) 3D displays.

A "portal to the virtual environment", or as I like to call it, a 2.5D display could effectively solve this. If we could enhance every 2D display to get what you see in Johnny's and my videos (and I mean every: LCD, CRT, you-name-it), then suddenly everyone can consume the 3D content even without having the "fully" 3D display. At that point it starts making sense to mass-create 3D content.

The terms "fully" and 2.5D, however, require a bit of explanation. Continue reading

 
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Development, Education

Eigenfaces Tutorial

The main purpose behind writing this tutorial was to provide a more detailed set of instructions for someone who is trying to implement an eigenface based face detection or recognition systems. It is assumed that the reader is familiar (at least to some extent) with the eigenface technique as described in the original M. Turk and A. Pentland papers (see "References" for more details).

1. Introduction

The idea behind eigenfaces is similar (to a certain extent) to the one behind the periodic signal representation as a sum of simple oscillating functions in a Fourier decomposition. The technique described in this tutorial, as well as in the original papers, also aims to represent a face as a linear composition of the base images (called the eigenfaces).

The recognition/detection process consists of initialization, during which the eigenface basis is established and face classification, during which a new image is projected onto the "face space" and the resulting image is categorized by the weight patterns as a known-face, an unknown-face or a non-face image.

2. Demonstration

To download the software shown in video for 32-bit x86 platform, click here. It was compiled using Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 and uses GSL for Windows.

3. Establishing the Eigenface Basis

First of all, we have to obtain a training set of M grayscale face images I_1, I_2, ..., I_M. They should be:

  1. face-wise aligned, with eyes in the same level and faces of the same scale,
  2. normalized so that every pixel has a value between 0 and 255 (i.e. one byte per pixel encoding), and
  3. of the same N \times N size.

So just capturing everything formally, we want to obtain a set \{ I_1, I_2, ..., I_M \}, where \begin{align} I_k = \begin{bmatrix} p_{1,1}^k & p_{1,2}^k & ... & p_{1,N}^k \\ p_{2,1}^k & p_{2,2}^k & ... & p_{2,N}^k \\ \vdots \\ p_{N,1}^k & p_{N,2}^k & ... & p_{N,N}^k \end{bmatrix}_{N \times N} \end{align} and 0 \leq p_{i,j}^k \leq 255.

Once we have that, we should change the representation of a face image I_k from a N \times N matrix, to a \Gamma_k point in N^2-dimensional space. Now here is how we do it: we concatenate all the rows of the matrix I_k into one big vector of dimension N^2. Can it get any more simpler than that? Continue reading

 
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