06/14/2018

Unity rocks!

I recently built a calibration tool (for calibrating a multi-camera system here at work).  Basically the app allows you to capture a set of calibration boards and then compute the intrinsics and extrinsics for the cameras. Here is a screen shot:

The problem I was having is that my intrinsics were coming out great (< 0.7 pixel error) but the extrinsics were coming out crap. I was trying to debug this but having a hard time visualizing what exactly was happening. Origiinally I decided I would just output the data using Collada and Visual Studio's builtin Collada viewer. This was okay, but a major pain (since if I wanted something as simple as a sphere in my scene I had to generate it). Instead, I flipped it over to Unity and just output a simple script that dynamically adds stuff to the scene. For instance, here is the start of one script:

using System.Collections;
using UnityEngine;
public class NewBehaviourScript2 : MonoBehaviour {
    // Use this for initialization
    void Start() {
        GameObject sphere0 = GameObject.CreatePrimitive(PrimitiveType.Sphere);
        sphere0.transform.localScale = new Vector3(10.0f,10.0f,10.0f);
        sphere0.GetComponent().material.color = new Color(1.000000f, 0.000000f, 0.000000f);
        sphere0.transform.position = new Vector3(-244.190948f, -165.309082f, 1257.367798f);
        ...

 Then just attach this script (which is thousands of lines long as it creates various debug objects I want to visualize) to an empty game object. Start Unity's player and now I get stuff like:

which makes it very easy to visualize what is happening.

02/10/2018

My name is Patrick Sweeney. I am a Principal Software Engineer in Microsoft Research's AI+R group. My background has mostly been in developing computer graphics and vision applications. Check out my LinkedIn page here for more information.

05/04/2018

This is cool. It was a pretty simple change to update my default Joomla Template to incorporate MathJax into this website. All the relevant changes can be found on: https://joomla.stackexchange.com/questions/399/adding-mathjax-to-a-joomla-website

Now I can do things like:

\$\sum{\sum{\chi{_i}{_j} \| \lambda{_i}{_j} \bold{x}{_i}{_j} - P_i X_j \|^2}}\$

to get nice formulas such as:

$\sum{\sum{\chi{_i}{_j} \| \lambda{_i}{_j} \mathbf{x}{_i}{_j} - P_i X_j \|^2}}$

02/10/2018

It had been quite a while since I last updated this website. So I decided to start over (moving from Drupal to Joomla). I'm going to make an effort to post something at least once a week.