Speaker-o-phone anyone?!?

One of these days I wanted to have voice chat with a friend of mine, but unfortunately his microphone was not working. He still had his headphones working though.

So I searched and found a very cool way to fix this.

Apparently microphones and speakers work the same way, however the difference being in the direction of data. Microphone is used to get voice data, whereas speakers are used to output the audio signals.

What I found was extremely simple and straightforward. All you have to do is plug the headphones jack in place of the microphone slot. Hoping that you have desktop speaker to hear other persons voice, you will be able to communicate with your friend using the very same headphones, just have to speak up into those small speakers.


I know what you guys are thinking now. No! its not one of those pranks, it really works. Simple physics!!

Linux Like Installation of OpenCV 2.3.0 on Windows

So you have been using Linux for opencv programming lately and now, for some reason, have no other option then to work on Windows. I too have to go through the same situation when I had nothing but Windows on my desktop and I was been too lazy to install Linux or maybe I wanted Windows for gaming.

Well this is your lucky day then, because I will be guiding you through 'Linux-Like-Installation' of OpenCV 2.3.0 on Windows. This guide will use minimum possible Linux System installation , hence it wont take much time to setup except for OpenCV compilation which takes sometime (and hey we all need sometime to relax)

First step is to download all the packages required for setup. Here are the direct links to the packages. You can also google these packages if, for some reason, you can not download them from here.

1. Minimalist GNU for Windows: TDM-MinGW-4.5.2
2. Cmake 2.8.4: cmake-2.8.4-win32-x86
3. MSYS 1.0.10: MSYS-1.0.10
4. OpenCV 2.3.0 Source: OpenCV 2.3.0

Windows?? nahhhhhh!

Ok, so I have been working alot on mac, for my new project. Today I came back to windows and it seems something is missing.

Hats off to developers of mac os, they have really put everything into its GUI, which windows still lacks a lot.

What I have been having problem with in windows was that if you want to scroll a page, you have to bring it to focus, unlike mac where its as easy as point and scroll.

So off I went googling, because I was hating microsoft people for not having this feature on their most recent version of windows. After a few clicks, I was able to have the same point and scroll on my windows too. Thanks to this small and very useful application named "WizMouse". It really helps when you are developing, and scrolling is all you need.

Download link: WizMouse

Vision for those who can't see

Following the simple line followers, I did my final year project on something which was much more complex and interesting (atleast it was for me). So, our group developed a prototype Guidance System to help Visually Impaired persons with their daily life.

Basically the concept behind this project was to first limit ourselves to the simplest scenarios a visually impaired person could possibly be in, and then develop a prototype system. Once that system was developed, we moved on to the next level, and did further testing.

The beginning

So that's where it all started. A few years back, when I was doing my bachelors degree, I started with my strong interests in robotics (not computer vision). Surprisingly, this field was very different from what I was actually studying at university level. I took up to the challenge and along with Telecommunication subjects, I was very keen at learning the basics of robotics. This was the first time I was building my very own robot, little did I know at that time that it was the very same robot which will lead me to a whole new different field of Computer Vision. A simple line follower named tracker was the turning point for my career.

Years later I did a Final Year Project titled "Guidance System for Visually Impaired using Digital Image Processing", which was basically a very complex line follower with no lines drawn at all. It used the natural surroundings and extracted 'useful lines' to compute the deviation and hence guiding a visually impaired person. Eventually I realized that my interests in the field of Computer Vision was way more than what I was studying.

Easily Compile and Build OpenCV codes in Windows MinGW Setup

After successfully setting up OpenCV2.0 with MinGW in windows, I started off with my project.

I was really annoyed at copying long string to cmd.exe to compile and link my project and then to execute by opening .exe file.

So I started searching about dos batch and wrote my own script to compile and execute my project in one go.
The script is as follows:

cls

@ECHO OFF

e:

cd\cvprog

:St

echo Enter the file to compile and link (enter for last file)

set/p "filee=>"

g++ -Ic:\OpenCv2.0MingW\include\opencv -oo -g3 -Wall -c -otemp.o %filee%.cpp

g++ -Lc:\OpenCv2.0MingW\lib -o%filee%.exe temp.o -lcv200d -lcvaux200d -lcxcore200d -lcxts200d -lhighgui200d -lml200d

echo Bazzingaaa!!

%filee%.exe

set/p "in=>"

if %in%==q goto exita

if %in%==Q goto exita

goto St

:exita

I am doing all my coding in the folder e:\cvprog , therefore everytime it runs it goes to that folder first. You can change the folder location to your own project folder.

How to use it? Simple! Copy paste this script in Notepad and save as run.bat on desktop. Open by double clicking run.bat then enter filename excluding the extension (which this script takes as .cpp but can be changed for ones requirement) to compile and execute your code. After first compiling and executing a code, the script loops back to start. Now if you want to compile and execute the same code again, you can just press enter key, the script will automatically take the last entered filename.

Thats all for now, right now I dont have much time to improve this script as I am working on my project. Soon I will be posting about my own project as well. Till then cyaa, happy coding :D

Setting up Opencv2.0 with MinGW on Windows

I have been using OpenCV for quite long now, and well I must say it is a very good library for implementing different image processing technique in real time. Previously I was using Ubuntu 10.04 along with OpenCV 2.20, which was very easier to setup as compared to my recent venture.

In order to test my projects on a slower system, I decided to work with OpenCV on my old desktop with Windows Xp. I thought it would be much easier and less time consuming to set up everything as Windows is always considered to be better at interacting with user. However after few hours, I was proven wrong.

Since I previously worked in Linux Envoirnment and my old desktop was slow enough to not smoothly run any IDE software, I wanted to setup something similar to linux terminal and gedit. After googling for few minutes, I successfully found the fastest, or should I say the slowest way, of setting up OpenCV. It involved using MinGW (minimalist gnu for windows) and OpenCV 2.0 precompiled library for MinGW. After installing everything, when I compiled a simple helloCV program, it crashed!