As most of the android developers, I am a big fan of google nexus tablets and smartphones. Have been using a google nexus 4 for a while now and I am impressed by all kinds of cool stuff you can do with it. A number of cool applications are based on different computer vision techniques. In this post I will be discussing these applications.
To list just a few obvious ones, the android based smartphones have face recognition based unlocking, camera app which can pick up faces, creating panoramas, editing photos and using readings from a number of inertial sensors to stitch multiple picture into one 3D picture called Photo Sphere.
Apart from what the phones can do, a lot things happen on the google servers as well. All android phones (when connected using google+ accounts) can backup all the taken photos to google plus photos. And whats even more awesome is that the server automatically makes these pictures awesome for sharing. These include a number of different enhancements, picking up of the best pictures from an event, detecting smiles, stitching multiple pictures together to create panoramas and (my favourite one) creating motion gifs from successive similar shots.
I discovered the motion gifs by accident, when I noticed that some of these synced photos were moving. This is a typical example of a fun computer vision application. The presense of a number of similar images, their geometric transformation and stitching into a gif all involve one or another advanced or basic vision method.
To give the reader an idea of how fun this feature can be, I have some example motion gifs created by my google plus photos backup.
After sketching a picture, I took a number of pictures to get a good one to upload. Google had some other plans...
A walk along thames has always been my favourite activity, no wonder why I got this awesome motion gif of big ben and Westminster bridge..
Some random pictures, all taken as a side affect of extreme boredom...
Now I gotta ask you one thing, what are you doing reading this..? get going with your smartphones and have some fun...
