Center of Kinect Coordinate System - kinect

I am working on a Kinect project and need to know the center of the coordinate system of Kinect. I have searched and found no definite working diagrams or spec sheet regarding this. Can anyone help me on this problem?

The coordinate origin should be the the location of your sensor(IR lens I assume). Everything it sees in it's frustum is then viewed as followed:
X axis is horizontal
Y axis is vertical
Z axis is depth (close objects have a small depth value/far objects have a larger depth value)
The depth unit with most sdks is in milimeters
You can use a 4x4 transformation matrix to define your custom coordinate system and make adjustments as you need them (e.g. consider the origin in a different location,etc.)

Related

Extracting a plane from an image taken by a camera

I have a camera at a known fixed location and orientation.
I also have a plane at a known location whose z position changes.
I want to turn the image from the camera into a top down view of the plane.
I can do this without knowing any positions by using the 4 points of the plane for a homography matrix and warping the image but each time the plane moves in Z I have to repeat this process.
After searching around online most methods seem to center on finding features of the image (using SIFT or something like it) then computing a homography matrix.
With the problem so constrained I thought there may be a simple linear algebra based approach.

In iOS is it possible to change a View's coordinate system so that 0,0 is top right corner?

Normally the 0,0 coordinate refers to the top left corner of a view. Higher x coordinates are further right. A frame / rectangle in the view has its leftmost point being its x coordinate and its rightmost point being its x coordinate plus its width.
Is it possible to reverse that, or better yet, reverse just the x axis? Make the 0,0 be the top right. Make the higher origins be further to the left. AND make it so a frame / rectangle in the view has its rightmost point as its x coordinate and its leftmost point as its x coordinate plus its width.
I know I could transform this stuff myself with pure math, but I was wondering if iOS offers this capability.
Not really.
iOS 9 has some new flipping stuff for supporting right-to-left languages, but I don't think you can force it.
You can flip the drawing of a view by setting its transform property to CGAffineTransformMakeScale(-1, 1), but that won't change the underlying coordinate system.
SpriteKit has a different coordinate system than normal UIViews, but its coordinate system isn't what you want.
You may want to read Coordinate Systems and Transforms, which discusses some techniques for mapping points between different coordinate systems. This MSDN article covers mapping points using matrices, which can help you on a theoretical level.
It's not documented, but UIView has an instance variable, _flipsHorizontalAxis, that does exactly what it sounds like it would do. It looks like it just passes through the CALayer variable of the same name.

How to calibrate a camera and a robot

I have a robot and a camera. The robot is just a 3D printer where I changed the extruder for a tool, so it doesn't print but it moves every axis independently. The bed is transparent, and below the bed there is a camera, the camera never moves. It is just a normal webcam (playstation eye).
I want to calibrate the robot and the camera, so that when I click on a pixel on a image provided by the camera, the robot will go there. I know I can measure the translation and the rotation between the two frames, but that will probably return lots of errors.
So that's my question, how can I relate the camera and a robot. The camera is already calibrated using chessboards.
In order to make everything easier, the Z-axis can be ignored. So the calibration will be over X and Y.
It depends of what error is acceptable for you.
We have similar setup where we have camera which looks at some plane with object on it that can be moved.
We assume that the image and plane are parallel.
First lets calculate the rotation. Put the tool in such position that you see it on the center of the image, move it on one axis select the point on the image that is corresponding to tool position.
Those two points will give you a vector in the image coordinate system.
The angle between this vector and original image axis will give the rotation.
The scale may be calculated in the similar way, knowing the vector length (in pixels) and the distance between the tool positions(in mm or cm) will give you the scale factor between the image and real world axis.
If this method won't provide enough accuracy you may calibrate the camera for distortion and relative position to the plane using computer vision techniques. Which is more complicated.
See the following links
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/camera_calibration_and_3d_reconstruction.html
http://dasl.mem.drexel.edu/~noahKuntz/openCVTut10.html

How to warp an UIImage using Open GL or any other method...?

I am trying to develop an iOS app to make any given image (UIImage) warp on selected locations.
So for this task to be accomplished what should be the rightmost way going forward, for now i'm doing some research on doing this on OpenGL (frankly any heads up on the framework would be nice too).
So finally the requirement is to get the UIImage warp on some given locations. (If x, y coordinates are there)
If you're sufficiently familiar with (or willing to learn) OpenGL, then you could do this:
Create a flat, rectangular grid of points to be a mesh that will be displayed with OpenGL.
Apply the image to the mesh as a texture.
When distorting the image at a particular location, you can just decide which points on the mesh will be affected by the distortion, and move them.
You can push points out from the center, or in toward a center, or shift them all in the same direction. If the distortion affects a large area, then you change a lot of points (possibly changing those in the center by more than those near the edges of the affected area).
Not sure what you mean by 'warp'. Do you mean skew it in 3 dimensions? If so you can adjust the CGAffineTransform for the UIImageView you are displaying it in to get that effect.
If you mean some kind of image processing warp, and you are using iOS 5, you can use Core Image for that.

World space to screen space (perspective projection)

I'm using a 3d engine and need to translate between 3d world space and 2d screen space using perspective projection, so I can place 2d text labels on items in 3d space.
I've seen a few posts of various answers to this problem but they seem to use components I don't have.
I have a Camera object, and can only set it's current position and lookat position, it cannot roll. The camera is moving along a path and certain target object may appear in it's view then disappear.
I have only the following values
lookat position
position
vertical FOV
Z far
Z near
and obviously the position of the target object.
Can anyone please give me an algorithm that will do this using just these components?
Many thanks.
all graphics engines use matrices to transform between different coordinats systems. Indeed OpenGL and DirectX uses them, because they are the standard way.
Cameras usually construct the matrices using the parameters you have:
view matrix (transform the world to position in a way you look at it from the camera position), it uses lookat position and camera position (also the up vector which usually is 0,1,0)
projection matrix (transforms from 3D coordinates to 2D Coordinates), it uses the fov, near, far and aspect.
You could find information of how to construct the matrices in internet searching for the opengl functions that create them:
gluLookat creates a viewmatrix
gluPerspective: creates the projection matrix
But I cant imagine an engine that doesnt allow you to get these matrices, because I can ensure you they are somewhere, the engine is using it.
Once you have those matrices, you multiply them, to get the viewprojeciton matrix. This matrix transform from World coordinates to Screen Coordinates. So just multiply the matrix with the position you want to know (in vector 4 format, being the 4ยบ component 1.0).
But wait, the result will be in homogeneous coordinates, you need to divide X,Y,Z of the resulting vector by W, and then you have the position in Normalized screen coordinates (0 means the center, 1 means right, -1 means left, etc).
From here it is easy to transform multiplying by width and height.
I have some slides explaining all this here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13crrSCPonJcxAjGaS5HJOat3MpE0lmEtqxeVr4tVLDs/present?slide=id.i0
Good luck :)
P.S: when you work with 3D it is really important to understand the three matrices (model, view and projection), otherwise you will stumble every time.
so I can place 2d text labels on items
in 3d space
Have you looked up "billboard" techniques? Sometimes just knowing the right term to search under is all you need. This refers to polygons (typically rectangles) that always face the camera, regardless of camera position or orientation.