opticalflow

I'm cracking 50, and I can't even imagine "retiring". In addition to my dayjob (which is plenty rewarding) I also volunteer for FEMA, Skywarn, ARES, and ARRL. Also looking to get my EMT cert. If I sat around on some beach somewhere drinking Pina Coladas I would probably lose my freekin' mind out of boredom.

I hate the term "AI" (even though I am CTO of a company with "AI" in its name, but since we use machine learning/DCNNs in our systems, it’s very trendy). The problem with "AI" is the "intelligence" part. Intelligence is a construct like "porn", like in the famous words of Justice Stewart about defining the latter "...but I know it when I see it". At best, it's very ambiguous -- and misleading at worst. They have been many attempts to quantitatively and qualitatively define intelligence -- none of which I find particularly satisfying and neither do any three given scientists in a room agree on a single interpretation. My problem with TFA is that it is comparing apples to oranges; deep convolutional networks are very different tools useful for a subset of problems than the ones using Bayesian inference and other statistical methods. Brute force methods like image morphology, object counting, and transforms are useful for even yet an entire Other set of problems. To say that one has displaced another is an error, in fact in most useful, modern, production systems a combination of all three is utilized, each to their purpose. To make direct comparisons between them while implying the historical decisions to use one or the other are due to Moore's Law is a false equivalence.

I clearly need my morning coffee.

I took five years of Spanish -- high school and university (I thought I'd since forgotten it, this was 30 years ago). A few years ago I found myself in Barcelona for a week. First day, I was completely lost. By the end of my stay I found it had come back to me, at least for rudimentary conversation. I even picked up a little Catalan. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a former boss. He asked if I spoke Italian. I said no. "But you speak some Spanish, right?" To wit I sheepishly said, "yeah but it's been a long time". Then he rattles off something in Italian and asks "What did I just ask?" .. "Something about wanting 4 glasses of Tignanello wine for the table" And he says: "See? You have enough to be in the conversation, or at least listen. Talking is overrated, anyway..."

This is not a lenticular display. It's a stack of 45 independent transparent TFTs.

I'm CTO of a machine learning/computer vision company, and quite a bit of the team's work is "gluing libraries together" -- but even so, it's an intensely interesting, rapidly evolving field. Plus I get to play with pixels and cameras and VR. That being said, I paid my dues in the 90's and early 2000's doing web services and boring J2EE and gluing Java to native and PHP to Perl to CGI [bleech]

I'd say there's a competition problem in that there are too many very poorly made "me-too's" that aren't even worth the 30 bucks. The Yi's come pretty close quality-wise to GoPro, have excellent build quality -- and frankly I like the Yi optics better than GoPro's... but they ain't 30 bucks. Disclaimer: I used to design camera systems and used to work in Hollywood so I can tell the s* from the Shinola, so I consider myself fairly picky.

All and all a good intro tutorial that gets into some of the common professional use cases. On "constant bitrate" assumptions and some of the subsequent discussion here, ANY transform-and-entropy codec like VP9 or H264 will ALWAYS be variable bitrate internally. In the pro broadcast world, where you can't go over your FCC-allocated radio frequency bandwidth allocation by even one iota (or nastygrams and fines ensue), this is "handled" by actually having the encoder understoot the actual target (say it's 5mbit), and then the stream is padded with null packets to get a nice even 5mbit/s. This also happens with LTE broadcast as well. The encoders that do this reliably are fabulously expensive and of a rackmount flavor.

They have a Yi 4k+ kit with a waterproof action case, much like the GoPro Hero line does.

The Yi 4K+ action cam ... https://store.yitechnology.com/

So, I wonder how many ad placements were made by these companies that specifically targeted experienced talent OVER 40 years of age? I'm going to guess a big, fat, zero.

I used to work for a smallish (<50 headcount) company that sold high-value software with a LOT of secret sauce in it (image processing algorithms) mostly to telco, wireless, and MSOs. The primary reason those folks wanted the source code was as insurance that if, as a smallish company, you went out of business, they would be jolly-well-rogered if they had deployed your stuff in the middle of their mission-critical revenue-generating operations. Our solution was always to use a mutually agreed third-party source code escrow service such as Iron Mountain. The only escrow release triggers were company insolvency/bankruptcy, or refusal to meet the SLA of support requests for an extended period of time (the -Off Clause).

It's an interesting conundrum (for my family at least). My father was very highly educated (Professor Emeritus of semiconductor physics/EE at a major University, you've likely heard of it). I started out putting a couple of years in toward a BSCE at that same University, but I abandoned it because I already had work experience, and the BSCE was just a consolation prize -- the only value it would have had is if I was going to pursue a doctorate/academic career. That would have come with a prospect of a lot of student debt. As it turned out, I ended up in a career making more than a trauma surgeon, but without a mountain of $250K student loans. Today, I have 6 kids, and the two oldest are at the ages where they need to contemplate college. One definitely has their sights on University, the other is ambivalent. What I tell all of them is that there is nothing wrong with wanting to become an Electrician, Plumber, Pipefitter or any of the other work trades. All are worthy careers and can be very lucrative.

Well, articles like this don't "Upset Me", but I appreciate them nonetheless. In the end, it starts with awareness, but ends in full action. In the meantime, I find myself making conscious choices like "You know, instead of the burger, I'll go for the caprese salad with the fresh moozarel". Not all the time, but more than I did a few years ago. In the aggregate, even small choices like this occasionally by thousands (or millions) or people can make a big impact.

Here, I fixed it for you:

if (globalservices) {

    yourescrewed=0;

    upgradeprobability=0.25f;

    bumpprobability=0.0f;

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.10f;

    bumpprobability=0.01f;

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.05f;

    bumpprobability=0.05f*(1-premiumeconomy*0.5);

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.001f;

    bumpprobability=0.10f*(1-premiumeconomy*0.5);

    yourescrewed=2;

    upgradeprobability=0.000001f;

    bumpprobability=0.10f;

    yourescrewed=NaN;

    go_f_yourself=1*(united_basic_economy);

    assault_probability=0.01f;

    upgradeprobability=0.0f;

    bumpprobability=0.20f;

    baggage_fees=1;

}

Well, all I can say as a former Continental Platinum (and later United 1K) is that the combination has resulted in the uttermost cesspool of service, fees, annoyances, and outright insults (thanks for stranding me overnight in Louisville KY on my way home to NJ and not even giving me a voucher for a hotel!). Anything they can do to improve service is fine in my book, but I'm not holding my breath. And just don't get me started on upgrades, delays, and bumps... let's just say I never fly United unless it's a direct flight.

I fly a lot. The only time that has happened to me was when I was on a flight out of Atlanta after taking my crew to a gun range to shoot some auto's. I'm gonna guess the cordite burns on my shirt and residue on my hands probably had something to do with it.

I didn't mean to imply that there were cases where it would Never converge, just that the number of iterations is not a-priori fixed or predictable.

We were doing GPU-based 2D-3D conversion for HD and 4K and one of the intermediate steps required that we compute a DT (distance transform), and JFA was perfect for this. The DT was used along with a Hough transform (also real-time) to conduct vanishing point and geometry analysis.

I was running this on (high end) GPUs back in 2011, in real-time (30fps), on 1920x1080 video textures. I can confirm that the clever recursion and performance of this is mind-boggling. Oh, and you get a distance transform out of it as an intermediate step, just for giggles. My general take is that while linear kernel-thinking in parallel might get nowhere, this is a prime example of recursion solving the problem when parallelism is available. I wish I could claim to have invented it... :)

Yep, it's all fun and games until your ASI goes haywire because of ice or a bug in your pitot tube, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_re...

However one thing I DO find clever about the Vision is their fully integrated AOA indicator as a primary instrument. This seems to be gaining traction in the industry overall, which should have positive impact on flight safety.

While their approach is clever, it is not guaranteed to converge in a fixed number of iterations. Author states that constrained Delaunay Triangulation is "slow and error-prone". I disagree -- I've implemented parallel and recursive Delaunay on GPU before, and it converges in a fixed number of recursions -- for a taste of the general approach, see here:

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tants/jfa/i3d06-submitted.pdf

JFA could certainly be "abused" for this purpose.

Well, I for one find this pretty cool, especially the part where you can select the altitude. As a licensed remote pilot, this gives me a good idea of winds aloft at-a-glance without having to parse an entire full-briefing with all METARs, PIREPs, AIRMETs, and whatnot. My main question is the "altitude" in this AGL (above ground level) or MSL (mean sea level)?

For my job(s) the last 8 years or so, I've had a mix of on-site (10%), travel (40%) and work-from-home (the remainder). There have been very long stretches when I'm neither in the office, nor travelling to meet with customers, however -- sometimes, months. From my standpoint, I can commiserate with the author here. I live out in the hinterlands with my wife and 6 kids, so there's no shortage of social interaction -- however if I've been stuck here for 6 weeks, I begin to get a little stir crazy. I "recharge" by going to trade shows/events/meetups in NYC (which is about an hour and a half away) -- the energy of the city is refreshing, but I wouldn't want to put up with it every day. Just once in a while...

I for one, would like to see a DSP book that focuses less on algorithms but rather on practical problem solving, such as memory bus limitations, red/write coalescing schemes, register optimizations, caching, and other optimization techniques. It's one thing to know how to conduct an FFT transform, quite another when you've been handed the task to do in on, say, a live 4K video stream.

This whole situation is rather nasty. There was enough of consternation going from NTSC ("never-the-same-color") to digital, with the bifurcation/trifurcation of SMPTE 240M, BT.601 and BT.709, plus the bifucation of "legal" versus "PC" color ranges for all of the foregoing (thanks, Microsoft). I've seen VERY few pieces of software (and even broadcast hardware) that get even just THAT complication all sorted, and even less people who really know what they're doing operating the systems and software tools involved. Now, we're adding BT.2020, SMPTE 2084, Dolby Vision, and all sorts of proprietary stuff like Sony S-LAB. This is going to be a disaster -- nothing will properly talk to each other, e.g. cameras, encoders, video displays/monitors. Everyone can't even agree whether 10-bit is enough or whether we really need 12-bit for accurate reproduction. SMPTE and ISO just punted the question down the road by saying you can have any flavor of ice cream you want. I predict fun times ahead at next year's NAB...

Author here -- this was shot with a single Richo Theta S on a rotating Fairburn multiplate on a selfie stick. Positioning was entirely manual, but used software to correct and compensate. There are a few vertical disparities (and a nice rip/seam in one area of the imagery) in this, but I'm curious what HN community thinks of the quality. Best to view with Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift, etc.

If you've ever been an executive member of a standards body like ISO, ITU or SMPTE, you'll understand where this sort of perspective comes from...

There were actually a lot of discussions about this sort of thing that lead up to the BIFS specification in Mpeg4 (Part 11). But BIFS obviously never anticipated virtual reality and the like, let alone light field or holography.

At least someone is thinking about putting a standard around all of this -- at least it's JPEG and not MPEG-LA. I found it very interesting how broadly they specified the goals here.

While the downvotes are cute, why punish giving credit where credit is due? I thought their quote was very clever, and worthy of drawing attention to. Just saying.