My name is John and I am a grad student at the University of Florida. As part of my research one of my tasks is to create a piece of software that is to display a map of the surrounding area, which shows the current location (from a GPS), and to implement a shapefile (as a boundary outline). I am not able to really get enough information to get on the right track on how to do this, and would appreciate any assistance!
The project involves a large-scale robot that will be operated by tele-communication in rough terrain. So this mapping and gps software will need to be entirely offline, but the location in use will be known. It is very preferred to find a cost effective means to doing this process (maybe even a simple API that could do the simple task, dll libraries, or active x.
My initial guess is to use a geo-referenced image (that I would get the lat and long of and know the boundaries of that image). Then from a GPS I then would treat the image as an XY plot somehow and that would provide the current position. Obviously even this step can be a challenge depending on what kind of image, map, kml file, etc that I can find and use.
So I would appreciate any advice, suggestions, or comments.
Suggest you online reference source code, and then modify their own, this project is currently on the Internet, you can through search engines to find. Good luck!
Related
I'm a complete newbie in this matter so please ... be patient!
I have a similar (though more complex, I believe) problem to this (Save data from ArcGIS feature layer) with the comprehensive answer by AaronS.
I thank in advance whoever might be supportive.
My goal is to retrieve (via time based script) data for real time processing from a meteo website (https://www.meteo3r.it/app/public/) based on ArcGIS. In particular, I need two types of data:
A) the most updated values of all measurements available IN A GIVEN METEO STATION (or ALL, then I will filter out)
B) two pixels maps with the radar measurement of rain intensity AND type of fall (rain, heavy rain, snow, hailstorm, ...) FOR ALL AVAILABLE GEOGRAPHICAL COORDINATES
Type A) Data seems available every 30' with a 1h delay while type B) seems more frequent with a 5' sample and 10' delay. Everyone agrees ?
For sure I will benefit of the python code (thank you Aaron again!) to turn data into column vectors as soon as I will be able to retrieve data from the server. And that's exactly the point I'm stuck at.
For A), thanks to Aaron explanation, I found this URL (https://www.meteo3r.it/dati/mappe/misure.geojson) that contains all the measurements for ALL stations at, I believe, the most updated value in time.
B) is definitevely tougher. I can't find anywhere the place where the radar data is stored and how to retrieve it. The only thing I found is that if you search for the word "radar" as Aaron did for "14001", the only file found is this "66xxx.pbf". It's a partially readable binary file that I suspect (not fore sure) is related to sprite images (pixel drawings) that are graphically showing the radar measurement on the map.
Indeed, the website shows something like 10 subsequent sprite images to show a "dynamic motion" of the clouds.
I just need the data in numerical form (lat, long, intensity, type) related to the most updated sprite available on the website.
Anyone knowing how to do it ?
Thanks a lot removing this roadblock to me.
I mean posts per sentence, not per letter. Such a doctor's prescription handwriting which hard to read. Not just a normal handwriting.
In example :
I use a data mining or machine learning for doing a training from
paper handwrited.
User scanning a paper with hard to read writing.
The application doing an image processing.
And the output is some sentence from paper.
And what device to use? (Scanner or webcam)
I am newbie. If could i need some example in vb.net with emguCV/openCV and researches journals.
Any help would be appreciated.
Welcome to stack overflow! The answer to your question is twofold:
a. If you want to recognize handwriting that has already happened i.e. it is presented to you as an image you are in trouble. Computer Vision is still not good enough to provide you with reasonable accuracy.
b. If you have a chance to recognize handwriting “as it's happening” - you are in luck. Download, for example, a Gesture Search app from Android play store and you are in business.
The difference between the two scenarios is subtle but significant. In the second case you have an extra piece of information that makes handwriting recognition possible. This piece is timing of each stroke. In other words, instead of an image with handwriting you have a bunch of strokes that are all labeled with their time stamps. You can think about it as a sequence of lines and curves or as image segmentation - in any way this provides a big hint for the system. Additional help comes from the dictionary on your phone but this is typically used by any handwriting system.
Android of course has an open source library for stroke recognition (find more on your own). If you still want to go for recognizing images though, you have to first detect text (e.g. as a bounding box) and second use any of the existing engines to process detected regions. For text detection I can recommend MSER. But be careful trying to implement even text detection on your own - you are entering a world of pain here ;). Here is an article that can help.
As for learning how to recognize text from images on the Internet - this can be your plan B or C or Z when you master above mentioned stages. Don’t try to abuse learning methods and make them do hard work for you - you will hit a wall if you don’t understand what’s going on under the hood.
Background
I'm working on a project where a user gets scanned by a Kinect (v2). The result will be a generated 3D model which is suitable for use in games.
The scanning aspect is going quite well, and I've generated some good user models.
Example:
Note: This is just an early test model. It still needs to be cleaned up, and the stance needs to change to properly read skeletal data.
Problem
The problem I'm currently facing is that I'm unsure how to place skeletal data inside the generated 3D model. I can't seem to find a program that will let me insert the skeleton in the 3D model programmatically. I'd like to do this either via a program that I can control programmatically, or adjust the 3D model file in such a way that skeletal data gets included within the file.
What have I tried
I've been looking around for similar questions on Google and StackOverflow, but they usually refer to either motion capture or skeletal animation. I know Maya has the option to insert skeletons in 3D models, but as far as I could find that is always done by hand. Maybe there is a more technical term for the problem I'm trying to solve, but I don't know it.
I do have a train of thought on how to achieve the skeleton insertion. I imagine it to go like this:
Scan the user and generate a 3D model with Kinect;
1.2. Clean user model, getting rid of any deformations or unnecessary information. Close holes that are left in the clean up process.
Scan user skeletal data using the Kinect.
2.2. Extract the skeleton data.
2.3. Get joint locations and store as xyz-coordinates for 3D space. Store bone length and directions.
Read 3D skeleton data in a program that can create skeletons.
Save the new model with inserted skeleton.
Question
Can anyone recommend (I know, this is perhaps "opinion based") a program to read the skeletal data and insert it in to a 3D model? Is it possible to utilize Maya for this purpose?
Thanks in advance.
Note: I opted to post the question here and not on Graphics Design Stack Exchange (or other Stack Exchange sites) because I feel it's more coding related, and perhaps more useful for people who will search here in the future. Apologies if it's posted on the wrong site.
A tricky part of your question is what you mean by "inserting the skeleton". Typically bone data is very separate from your geometry, and stored in different places in your scene graph (with the bone data being hierarchical in nature).
There are file formats you can export to where you might establish some association between your geometry and skeleton, but that's very format-specific as to how you associate the two together (ex: FBX vs. Collada).
Probably the closest thing to "inserting" or, more appropriately, "attaching" a skeleton to a mesh is skinning. There you compute weight assignments, basically determining how much each bone influences a given vertex in your mesh.
This is a tough part to get right (both programmatically and artistically), and depending on your quality needs, is often a semi-automatic solution at best for the highest quality needs (commercial games, films, etc.) with artists laboring over tweaking the resulting weight assignments and/or skeleton.
There are algorithms that get pretty sophisticated in determining these weight assignments ranging from simple heuristics like just assigning weights based on nearest line distance (very crude, and will often fall apart near tricky areas like the pelvis or shoulder) or ones that actually consider the mesh as a solid volume (using voxels or tetrahedral representations) to try to assign weights. Example: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/11/volumetric-heat-diffusion-skinning/
However, you might be able to get decent results using an algorithm like delta mush which allows you to get a bit sloppy with weight assignments but still get reasonably smooth deformations.
Now if you want to do this externally, pretty much any 3D animation software will do, including free ones like Blender. However, skinning and character animation in general is something that tends to take quite a bit of artistic skill and a lot of patience, so it's worth noting that it's not quite as easy as it might seem to make characters leap and dance and crouch and run and still look good even when you have a skeleton in advance. That weight association from skeleton to geometry is the toughest part. It's often the result of many hours of artists laboring over the deformations to get them to look right in a wide range of poses.
Does anyone have any idea what technique I should use to make the display video shift left, right, up and down as in the video below? I want to achieve this with a Kinect but with a different idea.
Thanks in advance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2hxaijuZ6w
EDIT:
Now that I'm awake, I'll go into better detail about this (it apparently took me a week to wake up).
So the Winscape project connects a real and virtual world by giving windows from the real world into a virtual world. The way it does this is act like the real world is part of the virtual world, and then changes the display of the monitors (disguised to look like windows) to replicate the view a person should see if they existed in the virtual world.
Imagine your virtual world. It doesn't necessarily have an end to it, but there's a point where you stop trying to render stuff into it, so let's say the world in enclosed in a box that contains all the rendered elements. Now what Winscape does is make it appear that the virtual world actually exists in the real world, and that you can see it through the monitors.
First step is obviously to create your virtual world. For starters, I'd suggest just creating a literal box. Make each wall a difference color, or put color gradients on the walls. Make something simple. If you haven't already decided on a 3D framework to handle this, I'd suggest XNA. It's C#, which works with the Kinect SDK, and it's got a ton of tutorials online to help you. Once you've created your world, use XNA to place a camera inside the box and add some simple controls to rotate the camera. This will allow you to look around the box from the inside, to make sure the rendering is working as expected.
Once you've done that, you need to decide where to put your windows. These will be the viewpoints into your 3D scene. To demonstrate this concept, here's a picture I took from an XNA camera tutorial.
Note that, if you read the actual tutorial, they won't say the exact same thing as me because I'm just hijacking the picture to demonstrate my meaning. So, the (0,0,0) point is where your "eye" is. The pink rectangle would represent your window. Looking at the window, four lines are drawn from the eye to the corners of the pink window. These four lines are extended forward until they collide with the background, creating the green rectangle. This would be the rectangle that your eye can see through the window.
Note that XNA will actually handle a LOT of this for you. You simply need to create a camera in your virtual scene and move it around, doing some math to aim it directly at your window. You'll want that camera to be in the virtual space in a way that represent your location in the real world. You can do this by using the Kinect to get your real world coordinates in relation to itself, then configure your application to know where your Kinect is in relation to your windows. Combing that data, you can get the location of your eyes in relation to your monitors in the real world, and since the monitors are represented by the windows in the virtual world, you can figure out where you exist in the virtual world. So place the virtual camera where your head is in the virtual world, point it at the windows, and do some magic to make sure only the window is viewed by the camera.
Original semi-lucid rant:
Okay, I'm going to take a shot at this (it's almost 1 AM, so let me know if I did a less than brilliant job and I'll come back to it when I wake up).
First, it'll involve quite a bit of math that I'm just going to skim over. You have, essentially, three layers.
Person ---- "Windows" (Monitors) ---- Scene
The scene, of course, doesn't really exist. You have to kind of incorporate the person into a virtual world where the scene, which is really just a flat image, exists behind a wall. The only way the person can see said scene is through the windows in the wall, which in reality is faked by monitors.
So, here comes the math. The Kinect can calculate where you're standing in the room, and more importantly, where your head is. From this you can get a general sense of where your eyes are. You'll need to take this point (your eyes) and translate it into the coordinates you're using in your virtual world. Then, calculate what those eyes should be able to see through the virtual windows. You can do this by projecting lines from the eyes to each corner of a window, all the way through until it hits the "scene" picture. Each window will correspond to a rectangular area on the background picture. This rectangle is what needs to be drawn to the screen.
The trickiest part is going to be setting up virtual world to nearly perfectly mimic the real world. Essentially, a lot of configuration ("okay, this window is 1.5 meters above the Kinect.. and .25 meters to its left.."). I'm also not sure how far back you should put the scene picture. If I think of something, I'll come back to this, but you can certainly just try it out and figure out a distance that works well for your set up.
Oh wait, now I know why I couldn't figure out the distance. It's because that example is using a 3D simulation. Pretty nifty. So you'd just need to figure out where you want to play your windows in the simulation or whatnot.
There are multiple techniques based on what setup you want to use (KinectDSK, libfreenect, OpenNI, etc.) and how accurate you want this to be.
OpenNI for example has a function called GetCoM which returns the centre of mass for a user (it doesn't need to track a skeleton at this point) which can be used. It looks like OpenNI was used in the video but they still use an old version. The newer version allows skeleton tracking without the 'psi'(ψ) pose.
Note that it doesn't look like it takes the user's head direction. The body could point in one direction and the head in another for example. G.Fanelli and his team have done quite a bit of research in the area. For Kinect check out Real Time Head Pose Estimation from Consumer Depth Cameras
I've played a bit with the KinectSDK and a Kinect for Windows and noticed there's a Face Tracker included.
In the end, based on to how loose or precise do you want the tracking to be, what's your ideal setup (maximum distance covered, content used, etc.) you can figure out what SDK/library will suit you best. Also, I imagine this also depends a bit on your experience with programming, in which case, also look for wrappers easier to tackle (e.g. Unity, MaxMSP/Jitter, Processing, openFrameworks, etc.)
Hello due to reasons of chinese paranoia and google being a bunch of pansies I am in the situation where I need to alter a number of gps waypoints stored in a gpx file so they are are correctly aligned with google map which is not correctly aligned... for reasons for aforementioned paranoia.
So I have a waypoint with a known landmark (railyway station) I can see that landmark on the google map, I would like to be able to move the waypoint in my gpx file to the new the one on the map and have all the other waypoints adjust accordingly.
This could be achieved by creating a new waypoint over the station on the map and calculating and then applying the difference or with some kind of GUI drag and drop.
I have no idea how to go about this and wonder if anyone knows of a decent solution other than persuading google to stop being pansies....
Of course google could change their magic misalignment randomly and then I'm truely screwed but hey ho.
Well you could build a small web app that takes your GPX track and overlays it on google maps. Then write some code to let the user enter some number of "corrected pairs" where they click on the GPX point and then the point on google maps. Once they have done this for n number of points, where n is the number of points you want to achieve accuracy, you can calculate an average errorX and errorY. Then you can go about and for each GPX point do X + errorX and Y + errorY which should be good on average.
Does that make sense?
Thanks for the reply TheSteveO I'd forgotten about this, in the end I used the rather handy javascript library provided here
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html
To build myself a simple command line script which loads and realigns all the coordinates based on, as you suggested the difference between a known point on google maps and a waypoint of the same place.
I did attempt to implement it in php but unfortunately ran into a slew of floating point math problems and being pressed for time just went the javascript route.