Time is a limited resource

Just a short post today on Intel's Openvino toolkit. It is really a great collection of machine learning models that can speed up development. I played around with their pose estimation model and the results are quite good. Final result of the pose detection system This system combined with the Intel Realsense depth cameras offer a promising real world solution to the pose estimation problem. As shown in the video, it works reasonably well on my laptop with an NVIDIA GPU (1060) Graphics card. The white spheres indicate the feet limbs and thanks to the Realsense depth camera we can estimate the positions of the limbs in 3D space. Although I haven't tried it yet but the models can be converted to work on edge platforms such as the Movidius device. Obviously this opens up a whole array of applications which I hope to share again in a future post.

In one of my projects, I needed to reconstruct an object for automatic painting by a robot arm. The target object is a hollow electricity meter box and the robot needs to paint the insides of this object. It is easy to paint the exterior of an object, but to paint the insides of a hollow object we need a decent enough point cloud to make sure our path planning works properly. An illustration of the object to draw is given below As indicated by the red arrows, the area just behind the small area is the target of the painter. Since I don't have electricity boxes lying around, I tried my experiments on a cereal carton. This is a long winding road of trials and errors and is divided into several parts. The first part is about the point cloud generation. Followed by experiments on camera movement tracking and scene and object reconstruction from point clouds. Finally a method to determine path points for the robot painter will be discussed. Preliminary research One of the first things t...

In this article, I'd like to share my project to count the number of people walking past a store/shop etc. The motivation was when I was part of a family oriented digital theme park company, we would want to know if daily sales (visitors) are good enough.  First, some background. Our theme park (store) is part of a department store/shopping complex. So we did not have a large piece of land like Disneyland, where all visitors are definitely there to visit the park. In our case, visitors to the shopping complex will consider taking their children to our entertainment theme park, so we would get a certain percentage of the total visitors of the shopping complex. So for example if we have 100 visitors on one single day, how do we know if this number is good or bad? If we know the number of people passing through our store we would have a better context. If the total number of people is say around 500 then we would be getting 20%, which doesn't seem so bad. But if the shopping compl...