Reinventing the Wheel: Panorama Stitching with Matlab

Reinventing the Wheel: Panorama Stitching with Matlab

A set of images that have some common overlapping regions can be stichted together to form a panorama picture. Some recent camera models can even compute the panorama picture internally and do not require post-processing on the computer. While this is a problem that has already been solved (for example, there is AutoStitch, here are some hints on classic DIY-panorama-stitching using Matlab, SIFT, DLT and RANSAC.

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Saving the Parrots with Homogeneous Coordinates

Saving the Parrots with Homogeneous Coordinates

A well-known result from linear algebra is that one can use a matrix to represent any linear mapping between two vector spaces. While rotation is a linear mapping, translation unfortunately is not. But, wait… by adding another dimension to the vector space, and by interpreting the vector coordinates correctly, we are able to perform rotation and translation with a single matrix multiplication! This article describes how to restore a fragmented image with the help of homogeneous coordinates.

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A Connection between Motion Blur and the Fourier Transform

Motion blur usually occurs in an image, when the camera was moved with respect to the subject. Motion blur has an interesting effect on the Fourier-transformed image, as pointed out by D. Burschka at University of Technology, Munich. Here is an example how the Fourier-transformed images of toy images look like that have been subject to motion blur.

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Disabling hot-corner effect in Gnome 3

When using Gnome 3, one can access the dashboard by moving the cursor to the top-left corner of the screen. As it turns out, I always kept accidentally moving the cursor to this “hot corner”, thereby opening the dashboard involuntarily. Here is a small hack that disables this hot-corner effect. You are still able to show the dashboard by activating the “super” key.

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Dual-booting Arch and Ubuntu with LVM on top of LUKS

Encrypting your hard drive is generally a good idea. Yet, the encryption renders dual-booting a little more difficult. Here I briefly sketch how I installed Ubuntu in parallel to an existing Arch installation on a LUKS-encrypted drive.

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Sampling from a Poisson distribution - a benchmark

Having a poisson-distributed random variable X, how can we efficiently generate samples (or say realizations) of that random variable? This article shows how Knuth’s technique can be derived and it also indicates that the Ratio-of-Uniforms method is quite efficient.

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Understanding someone else's source code

Who has the luxury of working on a green field project where you can write everything from scratch, and thus feel in control about your code? I usually don’t. There are several good reasons that force programmers to develop their skills in reading code they have not written by themselves. You might want to add a feature (extending existing code), fix a bug (maintaining existing code), look for inspiration (learning from existing code) or integrate functions into another project (reusing existing code). All of these goals require you to read code.

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Enhancing Details with Unsharp Masking

Unsharp masking is an image enhancement technique that sharpens an image and highlights fine detail and put more weight on edges. By subtracting a blurred version of the original image, one obtains an unsharp mask that in turn can be added to the original image. An easy-to-digest explanation can be found in the “GIMP help pages”:file:///usr/share/gimp/2.0/help/en/plug-in-unsharp-mask.html. Here is an example of a picture before and after unsharp masking:

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Nearest-Neighbor-Resampling in Matlab

This article shows the derivation of an algorithm for resizing images in Matlab, using nearest-neighbor interpolation. Scaling an image is mathematically just multiplying image coordinates by a scaling factor. Surprisingly, when dealing with digital images, the scaling process becomes a little bit more complex.

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Hosting bei Dreamhost, Domain woanders

Über wenige Webhosts lassen sich beliebige Top-Level-Domains registrieren. Beispielsweise ist es derzeit (Juni 2010) bei Dreamhost nicht möglich, de-Domains zu bestellen. Bei deutschen Anbietern wiederum ist dies möglich, im Niedrigpreissektor z.B. bei Evanzo. Bei Evanzo hat man Zugriff auf die DNS-Einträge der Domäne.

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Funktionsgraphen zeichnen mit PostScript

PostScript ist eine Programmiersprache, die zur Beschreibung von Seiten dient. Mit ihr programmiert man direkt auf dem Stack und nutzt dabei die umgekehrte polnische Notation, was einigen Spaß bereitet, sobald man mal den Dreh herausgefunden hat. Mit PostScript kann man programmatisch skalierbare Grafiken zeichnen.

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