Shawn Lankton Online

I got my motorcycle license a few weeks ago. Now I’ve got a bike! My buddy Ian let me take this sweet little Suzuki GS500 off his hands. With a new carb and a little bit of work its running pretty well, and I’ve been zipping around town on it!

I must say that I’m addicted to riding it! Since Jon and I got it working, I haven’t started my car : )

I plan to do a bit more engine work and make some cosmetic upgrades too. If there are any other new GS owners out there, make sure to check out these sites for lots of good info:

• GS Twin (The guys on the forum here helped me out a lot)
• GS500 Wiki
• GS Resource

Any other riders in ATL who want to meet up? Let me know!

I will be presenting “Tracking Through Changes in Scale” at the International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in San Diego in October, 2008. This tracker uses a two-phase template matching algorithm in conjunction with a novel template update scheme to keep track of objects as their appearance and size changes drastically over the course of a video sequence.

The pdf, presentation material, and citation information will be available on the publications page after the conference. Below are videos of the experiments shown in the paper:

 
LEAVES Sequence (High Resolution Download – 11.2Mb)

 
VEHICLE Sequence (High Resolution Download – 34.8Mb)

 
BOAT Sequence (Hi Resolution Download – 2.34Mb)

I took a special topics course in Spring 2008 at Georgia Tech, ECE 8893: Embedded Video Surveillance Systems. The course included three projects, each shown below. Detailed information about the algorithm is in the source code comments. (All the source is in Python)

Project 1: Activity Density Estimation

Use background subtraction to find moving foreground objects in a video sequence. Then, color-code regions with the most activity. Here is the result:

Source: p1.py

Project 2: Styrofoam Airplane Tracking

Find all white styrofoam planes in the scene and track them throughout the scene. We used color thresholding and simple dynamics to do the tracking.

Source: p2.py

Project 3: Pedestrian Tracking

Count and track the pedestrians that cross on a busy sidewalk. We use a combination of motion estimation via background subtraction and feature matching using the Bhattacharyya measure.

Source: p3.py
Final Report: p3.pdf

Most of this code is very hack-y because it was done quickly. However, it was
fun to learn Python, and the class was enjoyable overall.

Python is a very nice programming language. Fast. Simple. Free. I recently spent some time learning it for a class on computer vision. I was using the PIL and numpy packages to make Python feel more like my old friend Matlab.

The two functions that I couldn’t find, and missed the most (especially when writing hack-y code for class projects) were median filtering and morphological dilation. So, in hopes of sparing other the pain of writing them… here they are! The function medfilt_dilate.py has both functions.

medfilt_dilate.py

The medfilt() function uses the PIL filtering code. The dilate() function was written from scratch with NumPy.