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Posts tagged with: open source

Visual SfM: 3D Construction through Structure from Motion

blog header with text Visual sfm

From reviewing the paper The Untapped Potential of Low Cost Photogrammery in Community-Based Archaeology, it was easy to see that photogrammetry can be used as an alternative to high resolution surveying with high costs.

Traditional softcopy photogrammetric methods require the 3-D location and pose of the camera(s), or the 3-D location of ground control points to be known to facilitate scene triangulation and reconstruction. In contrast, the SfM method solves the camera pose and scene geometry simultaneously and automatically, using a highly redundant bundle adjustment based on matching features in multiple overlapping, offset images [Westoby et al 2012].

Structure from motion is the geometry of creating 3D models from 2D images. If you are interested in the maths behind SfM, visit Prof. Rob Fergus’s lecture notes on Computer Vision, or geometric vision, in particular Lecture 6 on Multiview Stereo & Structure from Motion.  It is quite interesting to see the process. Thankfully, to Wu Changchang, we don’t need to understand the mathematics behind how Structure from Motion works, to be able to use it. In his post-doc year at University of Washington Seattle, he developed Visual SfM.

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“If everything is a network, nothing is a network”

abstract image of network

I was researching open source and advocacy when I came across an interesting blog post about networks on the Visualising Information for Advocacy website. Written by Mushon Zer-Aviv, just a few weeks ago, it is a discussion exploring our concept of networks, and how the current trends in the visualisation of networks are missing important factors, such as flow, narrative and directionality.

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Critique: New York Public Library

graphic with text of new york public library digital collection

The New York Public Library has just released a Mecca for graphic designers, artists, researchers, designers, digital artists, fabric printers, scrapbookers, students, visual browsers and many, many, more.. The no holds barred online publication of over 180,000 digitized public domain images, that include manuscripts, maps, photographs, sheet music, lithographs, postcards, etc.

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Tools

image of a spanner

We can learn more from each other when information is open. A free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas.

Participation and collaboration is a fundamental key to being about to live in a community orientated fair world. Open Source software applies these principles to the development and sharing of new kinds of alternative digital platforms.

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Open Source

One of the first aspects I am loving about the course so far, is the lecturers. It is so refreshing to be guided by people who really believe in the love of knowledge, and share it so openly. In fact, everything about the course is open; Open Source. Using tools and information that is open source, our own thoughts and research, through this blog, will be open source. But what does Open Source mean? According to the Open Source Initiative,

Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone.

Free alternatives to the Apples and Microsofts of this world, owning and copyrighting everything. Examples of open source software that I already use myself are WordPress, Mozilla Firefox, 7-Zip, Open Office, Notepad++. There are many more that I havn’t discovered yet, and when I do, I will be adding to my digital box of tools.

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