Visual servoing of robots with uncalibrated robot and camera parameters (doi), to appear in Mechatronics.

Xiaodi Hou, with KLab, has a website for his Spectral Residual method.

Some random links to texture spectrum:

• Texture classification using texture spectrum, in Pattern Recognition 1990.
• Texture features based on texture spectrum, Pattern Recognition 1991.
• Performance evaluation for four classes of textural features, in Pattern Recognition 1992.

Texture Analysis and Synthesis using a Generic Markov-Gibbs Image Model, PhD thesis of Dongxiao Zhou. In the Texture Analysis and its Applications section, there are a few helpful pointers to texture segmentation:

• Modeling and Segmentation of Noisy and Textured Images Using Gibbs Random Fields , in TPAMI 1987.
• Unsupervised texture segmentation using Gabor filters, in Pattern Recognition 1991.
• Texture classification and segmentation using multiresolution simultaneous autoregressive models, in Pattern Recognition 1992.
• Textons, contours and regions: cue integration in image segmentation , in ICCV 1999.

Some random links to texture analysis and synthesis:

• The patchwork engine: image segmentation from shape symmetries, in Neural Networks 2000.
• Near-regular texture analysis and manipulation, in TOG 2004.
• Pyramid-based texture analysis/synthesis, in SIGGRAPH 1995.
• Texture feature performance for image segmentation, in Pattern Recognition 1990.
• A Review of Recent Texture Segmentation and Feature Extraction Techniques, in Computer Vision and Image Understanding 1993.

Exploring Space with Chip-sized Satellites, in IEEE Spectrum.

Reflections on the gentle art of effective teaching and mentoring (doi), by John D. Cressler, in IEEE Potential July-Aug. 2011. An inspiring article.

Shape Measurement of Steel Strips Using a Laser-Based Three-Dimensional Reconstruction Technique , in Transactions on Industrial Applications (TIA) July-Aug 2011.

Methods of Estimating Component Temperatures — Part 1, Part 2 – Case Temperature, Part 3 – Board Temperature, by Matt Romig and Sandra Horton, from Texas Instruments.

Machine Vision Revenue Growth Slowing, according to IMS Research.

ANIMATED-TEM: a toolbox for electron microscope automation based on image analysis, to appear in machine vision and applications.

Some interesting papers in Robotica Issue 5, 2011:

• Simulation of rigid-body impact using the articulated-body algorithm
• A humanoid robot capable of carrying heavy objects
• Design and operation of a tripod walking robot via dynamics simulation
• Localization of a high-speed mobile robot using global features
• Trajectory planning for flexible Cartesian robot manipulator by using artificial neural network: numerical simulation and experimental verification

Off topic:
The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization, in hbr.

Synopsys has acquired Optical Research Associates for Optical Design tools.

Power to the Masses — PowerPC Celebrates 20 Years of Embedded Success, by Jim Turley. While ARM is dominating the consumer embedded systems, Power has a strong grip on industrial embedded systems.

The Xilinx Xcell issue 76 was released. There is an article on using FPGAs for data acquisition in nuclear fusion in CCFE, and probably also for ITER.

A random collection of optics, interferometry, and metrology:

• Micro-optics: elements, systems and applications, available in TU/e library.
• Phase-Shifting Interferometry Papers by James C. Wyant from College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.

The ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) July 2011 Issue is also the proceeding of the SIGGRAPH 2011.

The proceeding of programming language design and implementation (PLDI) 2011 was released. There are some interesting papers:

The March of Technology, a talk of Rodney Brooks and John Hennessy. It is part of the MIT1500 Symposia, among other MIT150 events. Rodney Brooks has some funny remarks (at around 12 minutes into the video) on the non-exponential reduction of mechanical cost. It was detailed by the master thesis of Adam Kumpf, titled “Explorations in low-cost compliant robotics“. John Hennessy is citing Dave Kuck (at around 40 minutes into the video) about how hard it was to program ILLIAC and the fact that the architecture of ILLIAC may not match the applications. There are quite some interesting remarks in the oral history of David Kuck:

• “What I was really frustrated about was the fact, with Iliac IV, programming the machine was very difficult and the architecture probably was not very well suited to some of the applications we were trying to run.”
• “But what I came to realize was that any special purpose machine was going to be almost unprogrammable and very narrow. “
• “So my view though for the last 20 years has been, “That is okay if you want to just solve one problem.” And that was my objection to Kung with the systolic arrays. “
• “We found that, right, that there was such a range of things that happened in programs that I just turned my back on that [special purpose] approach basically.”

Some interesting preprints in Journal of Real-Time Image Processing:

• Fast implementation of dense stereo vision algorithms on a highly parallel SIMD architecture , which in a Clearspeed CSX700.
• A multi-processor NoC-based architecture for real-time image/video enhancement