Use pictures to search the web

A picture is worth a thousand words.No need to type your search anymore. Just take a picture.

Find out what businesses are nearby.Just point your phone at a store.

This is just the beginning - it's not quite perfect yet.Works well for some things, but not for all.

Your pictures, your control.Turn on 'visual search history' to view or share your pictures at any time. Turn it off to discard them once the search is done.

Learn more in the Google Mobile Help Center

Go to Android market from your phone and search for "Google Goggles".

Available on phones that run Android 1.6+. Learn more

Visual observation and analysis of animal and insect behavior

A one day workshop to be held in conjunction with the

20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2010)

Istanbul, Turkey

August 22, 2010

and sponsored by the EU ChiRoPing project: Developing versatile and robust perception using sonar systems that integrate active sensing, morphology and behaviour.

There has been an enormous amount of research on analysis of video data of humans, but relatively little on visual analysis of other organisms. The goal of this workshop is to stimulate and bring together the current research in this area, and provide a forum for researchers to share expertise. As we want to make this more of a discussion workshop, we encourage work-in-progress presentations. Reviewing will be lightweight and only abstracts will be circulated to attendees.

The issues that the research will address include:

• detection of living organisms
• organism tracking and movement analysis
• dynamic shape analysis
• classification of different organisms (eg. by subspecies)
• assessment of organism behavior or behavior changes
• size and shape assessment
• counting
• health monitoring

These problems can be applied to a variety of species at different sizes, such as fruit and house flies, crickets, cockroaches and other insects, farmed and wild fish, mice and rats, commercial farm animals such as poultry, cows and horses, and wildlife monitoring, etc. One aspect that they all have in common is video data.

Submission Information

Submit a 4 page extended abstract in English, in PDF, by email to rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk by April 1, 2010. The extended abstracts (PDF) should be anonymous. Include in your email the name(s) of the author(s), institutional affiliation, complete mailing address, international phone and fax numbers. The papers presented at the workshop will be published in the workshop notes, for distribution to the participants and linked to this page after the workshop.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline
April 1, 2010

Acceptance Notification
May 1, 2010

Revised Abstract Deadline
June 1, 2010

Registration Information

On-line registration of workshops will be available via the ICPR 2010 web page. It is not necessary to register for the full conference to attend the workshop.

Displaying Binary Images and Barcode

Article from The Code Project

One of my friends was asking me how to display barcodes in ASP.NET. There is a great Open Source code written by Bart De Smet which can return a bar code image from a bar code string; you could see his article here. I have just added to it a small option of whether or not to display the code under the bar code. The library returns an Image. I thought, adding the display of the bar code from the bar code string value to RBMBinaryImage would be cool.

Background

In the last version of RBMBinaryImage on CodeProject, some people pointed out that the control worked in Visual Studio perfectly but not well on some servers. I place here a solution for this problem posted by Louis, on of the control users on my site for the RBMBinaryImage, for users using the old version.

1. Open IIS and open the properties for the website you want the handler to work for.
2. Open Handler mappings and select a file extension which is served by ASP.NET, like .aspx, and click Edit.
3. Copy the file that's used over there (should be %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll).
4. Close the dialog and click Add Script Map... to add a new one. Put the copied value in the right textbox, and fill in .rbm as the extension you want to be handled - uncheck the option "Verify that file exists" when mapping the application extensions.
5. Next, close all open boxes by clicking OK, and you should be ready to go.

In the new version of the control, we can display a barcode as an image. Shown below is a screenshot:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/web-image/RbmBinaryImage.aspx

Connecting the Dots between Color Vision Experiments

John J. McCann

Thomas Young, James Clerk Maxwell and Herman von Helmholtz describe human color as the trichromatic response to the quanta catch of three retinal receptors, at a pixel.  In the 204 years since Young’s trichromatic suggestion, there have been many hundreds, if not thousands, of vision experiments that demonstrate that two patches of retina stimulated by identical spectral radiances do not generate identical appearances.  The usual description of these experiments is they are illusions

.

There is an alternative way to think about color vision, as succinctly put by Leonardo da Vinci: “Colors are most beautiful in the presence of their opposites”.  In this alternative construct, color illusions are simply color appearances synthesized from spatial comparisons.  For example, color constancy experiments show that objects have nearly constant appearance, despite significant changes in the spectral illumination.  Color appearance correlates with the spatial computation the object’s reflectance, using cone sensitivity functions.

This talk will discuss a wide variety of dramatic color experiments, including: constancy, adaptation, assimilation, Maximov’s shoe box, Land’s red and white photography, color-gamut mapping and color from rod/Lcone interactions.  All these experiments make a convincing argument that human vision differs from film and electronic sensors.  Vision works by making spatial comparisons.  We will discuss whether these experiments are in fact illusions, or the signature of vision’s underlying mechanisms.  As well, we will discuss whether many small modifications of trichromatic theory can account for illusions, or if this possibility is a delusion.

XDL.pdf

http://web.mac.com/mccanns/Site/Xerox_Distinguished_Lecturer.html

Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945

YouTube Statistics

Total videos uploaded as of March 17th 2008: 78.3 Million
Videos uploaded per day: over 200,000
A wildcard search on YouTube ("*") has given us the following "total results" (which approximates the total number of videos on YouTube)
January 28th 2008: 70 million
March 13th 2008: 77.4 million
March 17th 2008: 78.3 million
These numbers suggest that there are now at least150,000 and likely over 200,000 videos published everyday on YouTube.
The following statistics are derived from a *nearly* random sample of 232 videos on Wednesday, March 12th 2007.
Method: Every 2 hours, one of 8 researchers loaded the "Most Recent" videos on YouTube and analyzed the first 20 videos (the most recently added at that moment). This was done to eliminate the sampling bias of different times. Almost 20 videos were watched every 2 hours as they were uploaded to YouTube. 8 videos were blocked or removed before they could be viewed by the researchers, giving us the total of 232.
YouTube by Category: (Click here for a Tag Cloud Visualization)
Music: 19.8%
Entertainment: 19.0%
People & Blogs: 14.2%
Comedy: 13.4%
Sports: 6.9%
Education: 6.0%
Autos: 5.2%
Film: 4.7%
HowTo: 2.6%
News: 2.6%
Pets: 2.2%
Science: 2.2%
Travel: 1.3%
Most commonly used tags: (the following were the only tags used 4 or more times in the sample)
video, sexy, sex, music, rock, rap, funny, news, pop, dance, film, short, TV
Average Video Length: 2 minutes 46.17 seconds
Time it would take to view all of the material on YouTube (as of March 17th 2008): 412.3 years

Average Age of Uploader: 26.57
(note that this is not the average age of anybody who has ever uploaded a video, but the average age of active uploading)
Unambiguously User-Generated (amateur): 80.3%
Professional: 14.7%
Commercial Content Uploaded as percentage of Total Uploads: 4.7%
Vlogs Uploaded as percentage of Total Uploads: 4.7%
Percentage of videos that are probably in violation of copyright: 12%
Uploads by Country:
(Note: these statistics assume that upload traffic is consistent throughout a 24 hour period. For example the majority of YouTube videos are from the USA between 8pm - midnight CDT. If overall upload traffic is higher at this time than the early morning hours when USA percentage is low, then the USA may account for a higher percentage of total uploads. The reverse might also be true.)
USA: 34.5%
UK: 6.9%
Philippines: 3.9%
Turkey: 3.4%
Spain: 3.4%
Canada: 3.0%
Brazil: 3.0%
Germany: 2.6%
France: 2.6%
Mexico: 2.6%
Australia: 2.6%
Uploads by Language:
(same limitations as above for uploads by country apply here as well)
English: 48.1%
Spanish: 13.6%
Dutch: 3.9%
German: 2.9%
Portuguese: 2.9%

http://ksudigg.wetpaint.com/page/YouTube+Statistics