Symbian Signed again.

A discussion is going on at the symbian.org. It looks like a new symbain signed rules are in the work (my guess they will be implemented no earlier than symbian^4). Symbian signed may become cheaper and a new class of publisher ID may become available for anyone with a credit card.

Openness – Maemo vs Android

A great post from coll900 about comparative openness Maemo and Android for developers and users. Maemo designated as a clear win. The one point missing in the original post is a platform fragmentation. Android try to get around fragmentation using Java virtual machine (albeit with non-standard bytecodes). However native code will not be binary transferable between devices. That is especially relevant for augmented reality and other cpu-heavy apps. Here is a question – will Maemo be any better? For some mysterious reasons Nokia afflicted by irresistible drive to fragment it’s own software platform as much as possible. If Nokia manage to gather enough strength of will to keep Maemo on a single but mass-produced device line, like Apple with iPhone, Maemo could become developers dream and a serious competitor to iPhone. However if Nokia keeps its bad habit of producing zoo of semi-decent not-quite-compatible devices, with introduction of a new just-little-different device every quarter, just to break whatever compatibility still remaining, Maemo, with all its openess will not have practical advantage over Android.

PS. It looks like there will not be any Maemo fragmentation. Source at Nokia told Reuters that there will be one Maemo device, at least for next year. That a good news actually.

Switching to OpenCV 2.0 with VS2005

I’m using OpenCV for some tests, and for some reasons (freelance gigs and Symbian SDK) using MS Visual Studio. As new and shiny OpenCV 2.0 is out I decided to switch to it. As it happen, one absolutely have to read buried in the download section readme, before doing anything.
The thing is, OpenCV 2.0 doesn’t include lib files for VS. They have to be built by user.
So here is step by step retelling of readme:
1. Rename your old OpenCV installation to save it, just in case
2. Download and install OpenCV 2.0a
3. Download and install CMake
4. Reboot (or CMake wouldn’t work)
5. Go to C:\Program Files\CMake 2.6\bin and run cmake-gui.exe
6. In the “Where is the source code” field choose your new OpenCV directory (C:\OpenCV)
In “Where to build the binaries” choose directory for VS compiled OpneCV (C:\OpenCV\VS2005)
7. press Configure button and choose VS2005 (or whatever) as building enviroment
8. Press Generate and VS project will be generated in the C:\OpenCV\VS2005
9. Launch solution and build it. For debug build some projects require debug python libraries. As riseriyo pointed in comments if you have Python installed other than 2.6 that can cause problem.
10. Copy *.lib from C:\OpenCV\vs2005\lib\release (or debug) to C:\OpenCV\lib
Copy *.dll from C:\OpenCV\vs2005\bin\release to C:\OpenCV\bin
11. Now, reconfigure your application project. Include directories now “C:\OpenCV\include\opencv” instead of “C:\OpenCV\include
12. All libraries renamed from *.lib to *200.lib (cv.lib to cv200.lib) or *200d.lib for debug. Rename them, or change project settings.

PS if you need Python and still have a problem with cvpy:
From readme:
Known issues:
=============
1. Python 2.6 bindings for OpenCV are included within the package,
but not installed.
You can copy the subdirectory opencv/Python2.6/Lib/site-packages into
the respective directory of the Python installation.
Here is riseriyo explanation how he deal with python problem

PPS Comment by rise about vs2008 issue:
dll and manifest file version conflict in msvc 2008. the only way i was able to fix this was to completely uninstall msvc 2008 and then do a clean install w/o updating it with the sp1 packages.
see his blog and how he was troubleshooting (for days) the issue

PPPS As Niklas pointed out if you have omp.h not found error, that mean you forgot to turn off OpenMP in CMake.

That’s it. Project should compile now. If not you still have your old OpenCV installation

Fast Fourier Transform for P2P networking

Very unusual application of FFT in this arxiv paper. Butterfly diagrams for radix-n FFT allow building P2P network with maximum diversity, reliability and flexibility and minimum complexity.

Still checking Gauss-Newton

Though Levenberg-Marquardt works I’m still trying to save Gauss-Newton, especially as I’ve read paper saying that Gauss-Newton with dogleg trust-region works well for bundle adjustment. I’ll probably try direct substitution with Cholesky rank-1 update and constrained optimization.

Solution – free gauge

Looks like the problem was not the large Gauss-Newton residue. The problem was gauge fixing.
Most of bundle adjustment algorithms are not gauge invariant inherently (for details check Triggs “Bundle adjustment – a modern synthesis”, chapter 9 “Gauge Freedom”). Practically that means that method have one or more free parameters which could be chosen arbitrary (for example scale), but which influence solution in non-invariant way (or don’t influence solution if algorithm is gauge invariant). Gauge fixing is the choice of the values for that free parameters. There exist at least one gauge invariant bundle adjustment method (generalization of Levenberg-Marquardt with complete matrix correction instead of diagonal only correction) , but it is order of magnitude more computational expensive.
I’ve used fixing coordinate of one of the 3d points for gauge fixing. Because method is not gauge invariant solution depend on the choice of that fixed point. The problem occurs when the chosen point is “bad” – error in feature point detector for this point is so big that it contradict to the rest of the picture. Mismatching in the point correspondence can cause the same problem.
In my case, fixing coordinate of chosen point caused “accumulation” of residual error in that point. This is easy to explain – other points can decrease reprojection error both by moving/rotating camera and by shifting their coordinates, but fixed point can do it only by moving/rotating camera. It looks like if the point was “bad” from the start it can become even worse next iteration as the error accumulate – positive feedback look causing method become unstable. That’s of cause only my observations, I didn’t do any formal analysis.
The obvious solution is to redistribute residual error among all the points – that mean drop gauge fixing and use free gauge. Free gauge is causing arbitrary scaling of the result, but the result can be rescaled later. However there is the cost. Free gauge means matrix is singular – not invertible and Gauss-Newton method can not work. So I have to switch to less efficient and more computationally expensive Levenberg-Marquardt. For now it seems working.
PS Free gauge matrix is not singular, just not well-defined and has degenerate minimum. So constrained optimization still may works.
PPS Gauge Invariance is also important concept in physics and geometry.
PPPS While messing with Quasi-Newton – it seems there is an error in chapter 10.2 of “Numerical Optimization” by Nocedal&Wright. In the secant equation instead of should be

Problems

During the tests I’ve found out that bundle adjustment is failing on some “bad frames”. There two ways to deal with it – reject bad frames or try to understand what happen – who set up us a bomb? :-).Any problem is also an opportunity to understand subject better. For now I suspect Gauss-Newton is failing due to too big residue. Just adding Hessian to does not help – I’m getting negative eigenvalue. So now I’m trying quasi-Newton from the excellent book by Nocedal&Wright. If it will not help I’ll try hybrid Fletcher method.

PS It looks like the problem was not the large residue