Google Image Swirl

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/explore-images-with-google-image-swirl.html

Fixing EPS bounding box automatically

Writing a paper. Time to put Matlab or Scilab plots in. You go file->
save as EPS to include into Latex.
Surprise: Matlab has an awful bounding box space around the figure.
You want to autocrop it but its a vector graphics format,
so you can't use mogrify -trim +repage <filename> as you would normally
do with an image.

Solution: epstool. It does an autocrop for the EPS file:

epstool --copy --bbox input.eps output.eps

and your final plot will still look crisp.

Another option: save as PDF in matlab. Then use ImageMagick's convert to convert it to eps:

convert file.pdf file.eps

this will keep the vector graphics intact (at least in recent versions of ImageMagick).

Of course, you can always use pdflatex instead and avoid EPS altogether.

Oympics and World cup in Brazil

The 2016 olympic games will be at Rio! Also, the 2014 world cup will be in Curitiba, Brazil:

Website back up

My website is back after I took my server out of the lab.
www.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri
or, during daytime, you can check:
cortex.homelinux.org

Applets - the geometry of 2 and 3 views

These are insightful applets to introduce the concept of epipolar
geometry of two and three views.

http://www.ai.sri.com/~luong/research/Meta3DViewer/EpipolarGeo.html

When you press any key, you can drag the 3D point around and sense how
the geometry changes.

More action in twitter

http://twitter.com/rfabbri
Because the iphone interfaces to twitter rock. And "twittering" to blogger using gmail — like I'm doing right now — just doesn't sound as cool.

RISD GRADUATE THESIS EXHIBITION 2009

2 colors are enough

I posted another video like this a while ago, but I always get amazed at them. I can't help but think how shape and boundaries are enough for vision. I'd like to write up what's the role of the contrast sign in producing these effects. For one, the shadows being black helps a lot. The black traces the robots leave on the street make it look like it is covered in snow. Here is a simple inversion of the video (no sound so you can play them together without interference): Shadows become highlights, and the ground seems to be covered in water instead of snow. It would be cool to have another version of the vid with only the boundaries between the black & white regions.