A blog by Emmanuel Goossaert
Continuing on my experimentations with face transformation algorithms, I was wondering if it was possible to detect and extract, with a certain accuracy, the hair of a person in a facial picture. I found two useful publications on the topic, Detection and Analysis of Hair (Yacoob and Davis, 2006), and Frequential and color analysis for hair mask segmentation (Rousset and Coulon, 2008). Their approaches are quite similar, and make use of color models, frequency filters and Gaussian kernels.
More than a year ago, I was playing with some Computer Vision algorithms, and I posted this: Active Appearance Models in C++ (Paamela). The framework I built back then was a bit more complete than a simple AAM implementation, and actually I went up to the point where I was able to transform the sex, age and ethnicity of a person in a picture. The code was basically sitting there, taking dust in my hard drive. I had been willing to try some Objective-C and mobile development for some time. With the use of some magic (and good cross-compiling skills), I have been able to port the code from Linux to the iPhone. I now have a fully functioning facial transformation framework running on the iPhone!
I am not into social network websites, and when it comes to keeping in touch with people, I like to use good old emails. However, as my contact list and the diversity of these contacts expand, I am having problems following up with everybody. When networking with people met on…
1. Why using printf debugging when debuggers are available? Certain cases of socket, multi-threaded, or asynchronous programming make extremely difficult, by design, the use of debuggers or logging libraries. This is when printf debugging is the most useful. 2. Limitations of printf debugging The two main issues with printf debugging…
In a previous article, I was talking about optimum price and segmentation to augment profit. You can read that here. Sure, one can create different versions of a product to segment the customers and set an optimal price for each segment. But one cannot control the competition. This means that…
Setting the right price for a product is always a very complex task. Looking for the optimum price on a supply and demand curve would be the first step. However, most of the time you do not have this supply and demand curve. So you test different prices during long-enough…
Fritz the Cat is an independent animated feature from 1972, directed by Ralph Bakshi and based on the eponymous comic strip by Robert Crumb. With a budget of $850,000 and a gross revenue of $100M, Fritz the Cat is the most successful independent animated feature as of today. This is…
So I have been working at a startup company for about two months now, and I already learned many great things. I am not talking about new frameworks or programming tricks, but about peer-interaction and productivity. Coming with an academic background to a fully-pragmatic startup is not easy, and I…
I have seen many blog posts about Twitter bots, but they all seem pretty useless to me. People have this tendency to overuse things like Markov chains or other conversational agent library, just to make their bot look cool. But what’s the point of all that, and what problem are…
The rate at which gaming is penetrating the different layers of our societies has been rapidly increasing during the last decade. Sure, part of this is due to the fact that kids playing in the 80’s are now 30 to 40-year old, but another good part of it is a direct consequence of the vulgarization of video games in general. With the Wii and now Kinect, no need for fancy game pads and killer finger skills to play video games. A vector of this acceleration is also the recent urge in the social media world. With Facebook, social games have emerged, taking advantage of social and psychological constraints. Games are no longer confined to the virtual world, and are crushing into the real world.
