Video and XML fun

This is only going to be a short over view of what I was up to over the weekend as there was a bit of time limitation with what I was up to. As I will now explain.

So over the weekend I was working on getting video up of PETS 2009 with HoG(Histogram of oriented gradients), moving average of HoG and ground truth. My first issue came when I noticed that the ground truth I was using was not accurate and missing out counting people that were in the scene. As I had trouble finding other ground truths for S2L1 scene and other scenes I created my own xml ground truth generator. This goes through the images one by one and the user can then enter the number of people in the scene. This then creates an xml document with the ground truth the user enters for the scene. This makes creating ground truth for future scenes that I can not find ground truths for a lot easier. I can then check through this and compare to the results of HoG and the moving average.

Once this was implemented then I had to generate a video displaying this information. This originally took a long time of close to an hour for 794 images which was was too long. I then reduced the number of frames to take down to 120 this meant it was a lot quicker. Then I had to turn the images into a video, originally I tried turning them straight into a .mp4 but took to long and crashed laptop several times. To overcome this I converted them to a .gif and then turned the .gif into a .mp4. This was still time consuming but more stable. I did this using the following commands.


convert -delay 30 -loop 0 *.jpg result.gif - using this source

ffmpeg -f gif -i infile.gif outfile.mp4 - using this source

Once I got them done I joined them together using the following command.

MP4Box -cat s2f.mp4 -cat s2ff.mp4 -cat s6f.mp4 -cat s6ff.mp4 -new all.mp4
 - That I found here


Now the video was done I uploaded to YouTube with a brief description. The video can be found here.

I am now looking at implementing blob tracking on the videos then move onto dealing with occlusions which will help me more accurately count people in a crowd. First I need to create some tests for the stuff I have.

The begginning of the end!

Well I am coming closer and closer to the end of university and as such that means it is dissertation time. I am going to keep a diary of what I have been up to with regards to my dissertation and keep up to date weekly. You can follow along and see what I go through and offer help or even learn some stuff.

First things first what am I doing?

Well it is called scene interpretation, which basically means I will take a video of something such as a street view that is publicly accessible and analyse the environment or people. With the people aspect there is some ethical concerns but thankfully there is already large data set that are available to use here. My first step though with regards to my dissertation project is to decide what aspect I am to focus on, whether people/crowd analysis or environment analysis. This will then be the core focus of my work and will stop me branching out to far and creating to much work for myself.


As well as deciding what to focus on I also am having a look at openCV in Python. I have found this link to a good tutorial, but I dare say I will be using multiple resources for learning as I go. I have used Python before but never for a project so this could be quite interesting. There will also be some background reading done on information about scene analysis to be able to use some examples or learn from.


My first goal is to get a system up and running that can do basic processing of videos and get some kind of recognition going on it. I have a meeting later this week so I can discuss in more detail where to go from there.

Busy Bee

Well everything is going well at university. I am keeping busy with work, sports and social.

Dance sport: I am getting better at dancing now which is good as I have put myself down for competition in Warwick in November. I am very nervous and I need to go shopping for some dance shoes and clothing. I have a brilliant partner who puts up which my foibles and every one in the society is awesome and mad and I love them all :). I do fit in well with them. So stay tuned to see my results.


Fencing: On Saturday I took part in the novice fencing competition with five others. During the day I didn't lose a match, to which I was shocked, but the final is on Tuesday. I am nervous about it as everyone else will be there for training but I will give it my best and hope I win. 


Football: Football is going well had our first proper match today which didn't go brilliantly. Hopefully our next match will go a little better. Definitely a good way to wake up though.


Uni: Got a few assignments handed out that are proving to be fun and a few more to be handed out. Got one on WebGL creating a model solar system and one to write a report on agile and another on vision.


Social: Well after a few comments on a post in our computer science page on Facebook I have become the social representative for computer science. So looks like I will be organising the socials for a while, which I am not to fussed about. Hopefully, more people will turn up.


SSCC(Staff Student Consultative Committee): I have also joined SSCC which means I will be a representative for my subject and year. So people who want to raise issues then I can report them back to people higher up who can sort them out and improve things or help out at the time if possible.

Start of University... well 3rd/4th year

So final year has started and I have done a little reading on my subjects at hand and I have started work on some tutorials. I am also still having a social life but my sleep is a little bit reduced. I am looking at taking up some dancing and football as well as continue my archery. I was asked if I wanted to got to a knitting club of which I would have loved to if I hadn't made previous arrangements. Need to look at going though should be fun.


I am trying this year to not only get round to doing more social activities and improve my grade, to hopefully graduate with a first, but also looking at developing more technical knowledge in areas outside of my modules. I have spoken to some of my friends and we have spoke about a few projects such as a wearable technology. Also kinda on the technical side we are already planning the raft for next years charity raft race at Glengower hotel.


Lastly as though I probably won't update my blog a lot I will try to keep you all informed of whats going on or any topics I find interesting. So look forward to hopefully some interesting reads.

Introductions

Well this is my first post(On my new blog, all the posts before this were imported) so I think I should introduce myself a bit. My name is Chris and I am 24, won't give you too much on me, stops you tracking me down :P

A little bit about myself. I am quite crazy and very talkative, tall at around 6' 2", love to have a laugh and travel. I don't play games that much as I am not brilliant but I have been doing more since restarting my YouTube channel. I love watching TV and Films and could talk about them forever.

I am currently on my industrial year down south which will becoming to an end soon, this makes me sad. I have learnt loads while down here and hopefully can come back as a Graduate. I have met some wonderful people here who I hope to remain friends with for a long while and hopefully see them again at some point in the future.

In a couple months time I shall be heading to my parents hope for a brief stop and relaxation and then it will be back off to university for my final year. I go university in Aberystwyth, which if you are not familiar with, is a lovely coastal town in Wales(Lovely when not being destroyed by waves, no seriously check the past news reports). My time there has been fantastic and amazing, the people I have met there will be friends for life, some of whom I would even go as far as to call my family. When I get back I will be living with two other friends who do computer science, which is what I do by the way. I am not looking forward to the large amount of work that needs to be done but I am looking forward to being home.

Before I go I shall leave you with some handy links :)

YouTube - Ignore the first few videos, the channel is still going under changes and I am getting used to some video editing settings.

Twitter - Feel free to follow or message me on here and I will also try and get back to you if you ask a question. If you have any topics you wish for me to talk about please don't hesitate to ask.