Welcome to uavster's blog (filtered)

OpenCV 3.0.0-alpha came out recently with exciting new functionalities. I was keen to give a try in particular to the new 3D reconstruction functions, so I downloaded, built and installed OpenCV 3.0.0-alpha [...]

CVswitch allows you to take snapshots of OpenCV installations and switch between them at light speed. It is open-source and I am releasing it under the GPL 3 license on GitHub [...]

Some people might think that the correct way of working on my experiment without affecting my client's project would be installing version 3 in its own directory and making my experiment point there. [...]

Tracking an object over a video sequence is a classic problem in Computer Vision. A tracking algorithm looks for the object at every new frame, given a model of the object. This model holds information [...]

There are tons of tutorials on color-based tracking that use the histogram back-projection to find those pixels in the image that are most likely to be object pixels. Then, they use MeanShift [...]

After normalization, each bin value in the color histogram expresses the probability that a pixel has a color in bin B, given that it is a pixel of object O. We can express this as the conditional probability [...]

Stand up and close your eyes. If you have superpowers and managed to memorize this text before doing so, you'll be now reading it in your mind. Now, try to walk straight for two meters towards somewhere [...]

In order to know their spatial orientation and keep balance, robots use Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). They are composed of accelerometers, gyroscopes and, sometimes, magnetometers that measure linear [...]

Thanks to MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), the components in an IMU today can be embedded into chip-like casings and consume very low power. This opened the door some years ago to the inclusion of [...]

I still remember my first mobile phone back in 1998. It was an Alcatel One Touch Easy. You could do thousands of things with it: calling your parents, calling your girlfriend, calling your friends, calling [...]

Ok, let's get serious. Needless to say, today's smartphones are orders of magnitude more powerful than my old Alcatel thanks to Moore's law. In fact, they are becoming powerful enough to execute [...]

Since a few months ago, I had programmed computer vision software for desktop machines and laptops. I always thought of trying with Android or other mobile operating system, but never had time to really [...]

Home, sweet home. My luggage is laying on the floor, as exhausted as me. I arrived yesterday from Braunschweig, Germany, but went straight to bed for a mandatory energy charge. I slept for an insane number [...]

1) Special Award for the "Best Automatic Performance"
2) 2nd place in the Indoor Flight Dynamics Challenge

According to the organization, our drone was the first one in the history of the competition to pass the challenge without any human intervention, entirely on its own. This is the reason [...]

My colleague Jesús Pestana did an amazing job with the position estimation and high-level controllers (trajectory and mission). My contributions were the software framework, visual speed estimation, [...]