Bits of py

The conference proceedings have just been released for the 1st Kiwi PyCon. I presented and wrote a paper so this is my first ever published work. The entire journal can be found on the pythonpapers.org site and just my paper is here . The abstract is simply: An introduction to computer vision in Python, from the general concept to its implementation with some current open-source libraries. This paper demonstrates a selection of basic computer vision examples using SciPy, OpenCV and Pygame. Python in Computer Vision View more documents from Brian Thorne on slideshare.

Open Allure DS An open source project that I have started with John Graves a PHD student in Auckland for a smart computer interface for tutoring. Haven't really had an opportunity to start hacking away yet - but I am really hoping to find some time to chuck something together. It will possibly use my pycam module and speech recognition - ideally it will be cross platform and open source. To start with we are planning to create a learning game involving recognizing numbers and colors for the initial prototype. Interaction is based on a novel vision and speech based system instead of the mouse and keyboard. The learning game(s), initially aimed at preschool age children, teaching anything from recognizing numbers and colours to basic math. Interaction is based on a novel vision and speech based system instead of the mouse and keyboard. A very early vision of what it might look like... Each column is a different color or contains a different letter (or different...

Well I have given my first ever conference talk! Wasn't any where near as scary as I'd feared and all my live python demos using the webcam worked fine. My slides have been uploaded on slideshare here . Heaps of random snippets from the weekend made it onto twitter . The conference had two main tracks, with delegates enjoying presentations on project management, science and maths, games and animation, and web development. There were also more interactive sessions with conference attendees participating in short presentations or open discussions on a specific theme. All in all I had a great weekend at the conference, learnt heaps and made some new contacts in the Python community. The maths exam the following day wasn't to bad either. Now the next challenge - concurrent systems modelling for scipy.

Something used heaps in the film industry is the " Greenscree n" I thought I would take a quick look at how to make a greenscreen that works fast enough to run on a live webcam stream. And infact one that works with any coloured background. It has many many limitations, but was a fun experiment! To run this example you will need OpenCV with the SWIG Python bindings installed. You can get this code from my SVN repository here . Firstly the background I started with: Adding an object to the scene, and carrying out back ground subtraction: So anyhow the code: #!/usr/bin/env python from VideoCapturePlayer import VideoCapturePlayer as VCP from opencv import cv def threshold_image ( image , n = []): """Record the first 5 images to get a background, then diff current frame with the last saved frame. """ if len ( n ) < 5 : # n[4] will be our background # First capture a few images ...

Image capturing is happening with the pygame.camera module. Object Detection is using an ObjectDetect class I wrote that wraps the cvHaarDetectObject from the opencv library. Just for fun the green box is drawn with pygame, the Red boxes are drawn with opencv. And the whole thing is rendered with pygame.