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Windows & .NET Watch: Prototyping with Processing

By Larry O'Brien

July 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
Recently, I had a client who was interested in “augmented reality” applications. The phrase is used to describe applications that overlay computer-generated imagery on a heads-up display or, at least, a live video feed. This type of thing is old hat at ACM SIGGraph but still pretty radical for a consumer website marketing campaign.

Perhaps one day I’ll have one of those clients that says, “Take your time and let us know what you discover. We’re writing this development effort off as high-risk, high-payback research and development.” They’ll pay in pixie dust and give me rides on their flying horses. Until then, like most post-collegiate developers, I have to be careful about embarking on “interesting” programming projects.

In the case of augmented reality, success depends on recognizing targets within video frames. The targets take up relatively few pixels and have lower contrast and far more noise than in a reference photo. Even a plain vanilla video display eats up a significant amount of local resources, and in addition to finding the targets, you presumably have to, you know, do something with the information, such as reconstruct the spatial location of the targets, project that onto some model, and composite that into the output. And then you have to do it all over again in the next several dozen milliseconds.

If you are interested in video processing, you should probably begin with OpenCV and, if possible, combine it with Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitive libraries. Unfortunately, for various reasons this was inappropriate for my client’s application. Strangely, this actually lowered my risk profile for the project; had I the advantages of object-recognizing libraries and SIMD instructions, I definitely would have faced the risk of not properly taking advantage of them!

Instead, I had a straightforward brick wall to get through: Could I reliably do target detection in a video frame? Further, I knew that the client would not fund the development of a sophisticated object-detection algorithm (no Viola-Jones boosted rejection cascades for me!). If I couldn’t achieve the detection goals with a relatively simple algorithm, I would have too little traction on the problem to commit to a schedule for the whole project.

Related Search Term(s): Processing

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