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3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

cs.cornell.edu

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Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#21

Post by [deleted] »

rboyd wrote: post #9
pen2l wrote: post #6

I wish these groups would make their code available so others could play with it and test it out. Some do, but I wish more did. I would be curious to see the performance of this 3d depth reconstruction technique for non-rigid environments.

Yeah! Having spent much of the last year plowing through computer vision papers, it's pretty rare to encounter published code or even datasets. Why is this? Do people spend all their time polishing prose and neglecting the code? Or maybe they keep it closed for commercial intentions? Or is it just a cultural thing in all of academia?

[deleted]

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#22

Post by web007 »

pen2l wrote: post #6

I wish these groups would make their code available so others could play with it and test it out. Some do, but I wish more did. I would be curious to see the performance of this 3d depth reconstruction technique for non-rigid environments.

The YouTube video in the HN comments links to one of the authors' Stanford page, which redirects to this page at Cornell: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asaxena/rccar/

There you can find the source for both the vision code in MatLAB, and a link to http://make3d.cs.cornell.edu/code.html for the full source.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#23

Post by zxv »

rboyd wrote: post #9
pen2l wrote: post #6

I wish these groups would make their code available so others could play with it and test it out. Some do, but I wish more did. I would be curious to see the performance of this 3d depth reconstruction technique for non-rigid environments.

Yeah! Having spent much of the last year plowing through computer vision papers, it's pretty rare to encounter published code or even datasets. Why is this? Do people spend all their time polishing prose and neglecting the code? Or maybe they keep it closed for commercial intentions? Or is it just a cultural thing in all of academia?

In my experience, blind reviewers for peer reviewed journal articles in certain cases may argue that publicly available binary or sources are a prior publication of the technique or method, and a reason for rejecting the paper.

This risk is hard to assess in advance. Many journals do not clarify the policy regarding advance publishing of source code or even binaries alone.

Given the impact this could have on a student's career, this is worth considering carefully, and if possible, clarifying in advance with the journal's editor or program chair.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#24

Post by jmcmahon443 »

rboyd wrote: post #14
jmcmahon443 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science = Nature. Code = Applying Nature.

This would be a lot easier to jibe with if the paper was based on proof alone. A lot of the work in this realm isn't that. Plenty of these researchers are also fine engineers and I'm sure have great code. It just seems crazy to develop a new technique so completely and stop short of releasing the code. I think it's because the academic culture encourages this as if the code detracts from the purity of the research.

I see where you're coming from. I think the truth is actually dependent on the particular institution and particular academic.

For example, OpenRave is the result of academics open sourcing their research.

Update: Someone posted a link to the code.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#25

Post by jmcmahon443 »

web007 wrote: post #22
pen2l wrote: post #6

I wish these groups would make their code available so others could play with it and test it out. Some do, but I wish more did. I would be curious to see the performance of this 3d depth reconstruction technique for non-rigid environments.

The YouTube video in the HN comments links to one of the authors' Stanford page, which redirects to this page at Cornell: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asaxena/rccar/ There you can find the source for both the vision code in MatLAB, and a link to http://make3d.cs.cornell.edu/code.html for the full source.

Thanks!

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#26

Post by jmcmahon443 »

pen2l wrote: post #11
jmcmahon443 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love open source, but there is a very good reason why academics generally don't release their code. They are scientists: they are best at testing, explaining, and documenting nature. Code is an engineer's job: making it as fast and robust as possible for the given application or with the latest tools. They want to make you work for it :)

With all due respect, that is a stupid reason. I don't have time to implement every last thing. And I don't require robust code all the time -- it's very understandable for the code to not be robust if it's being provided by a small group with not a lot of funding or resources. Hell, if they make it open source I will contribute to it expecting nothing in return to make it better in any way I can. I really think that…

Academics aren't always concerned with making your job easy, they have lives too. They may have struggled a lot for their results and their code is still a living document, or they sell it to a company. Maybe their grant ran out and they got pulled into something else. Maybe they died.

There's a lot of factors.

Look at OpenRave. It's the result of an academic open sourcing his research.

I just think at the end of the day, a research paper exists to validate human understanding of nature - not give you a boilerplate for implementing it.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#27

Post by dheera »

jmcmahon443 wrote: post #2

tl:dr; Can combine monocular NN CV techniques with stereo techniques for good, cheap results. AKA: The future of SLAM.

I do not think this kind of feature-based estimation of depth will be the future of SLAM. Point this algorithm at a scale model or a framed photograph and everything will go haywire. It's great for scene understanding, in which you point it at a photograph or artwork and you want it to understand what's going on in the photograph. But not for mission-critical mapping and navigation.

Depth cameras, which are getting cheaper, will be the future of SLAM. SLAM algorithms for depth cameras are also a lot simpler to write. And with depth cameras, you're not estimating how far away objects are, you're actually measuring their distance. Data beats estimation.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#28

Post by jmcmahon443 »

dheera wrote: post #27
jmcmahon443 wrote: post #2

tl:dr; Can combine monocular NN CV techniques with stereo techniques for good, cheap results. AKA: The future of SLAM.

I do not think this kind of feature-based estimation of depth will be the future of SLAM. Point this algorithm at a scale model or a framed photograph and everything will go haywire. It's great for scene understanding, in which you point it at a photograph or artwork and you want it to understand what's going on in the photograph. But not for mission-critical mapping and navigation. Depth cameras, which are getting c…

Depth/stereo cameras are the future, I agree. But the conclusion of this paper says that you can cascade the results of this algorithm with the stereo algorithm fairly easily.

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#29

Post by dr_zoidberg »

leeoniya wrote: post #13
pen2l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Tango ( https://www.google.com/atap/project-tango/ ) is able to do pretty impressive 3d reconstruction from what I hear. However it has a number of cameras, whilst linked technique can work with just one image (with enough training).

reconstructing depth from 2+ offset images is vastly simpler than from a single frame.

There's an OpenCV tutorial for those wishing to try it[0].

[0] http://docs.opencv.org/3.0-beta/doc/py_tutorials/py_calib3d/...

Re: 3-D Depth Reconstruction from a Single Still Image (2007) [pdf]

#30

Post by dr_zoidberg »

Xcelerate wrote: post #16
rboyd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! Having spent much of the last year plowing through computer vision papers, it's pretty rare to encounter published code or even datasets. Why is this? Do people spend all their time polishing prose and neglecting the code? Or maybe they keep it closed for commercial intentions? Or is it just a cultural thing in all of academia?

Speaking from experience, the code is normally functional but unsightly, thus it would be embarrassing to place it online. Most researchers are happy to email you the code if you ask for it though. Most of my code is for scientific computing and consists of a bunch of one-off Jupyter notebooks and Julia scripts that are written with two objectives in mind: get-the-task-done-before-my-advisor-meeting and make-it-as-fa…

I completely agree with you and I can relate with your "objectives in mind". But you really need to push to get others using Git.

GitHub's GUI client is very easy to use and with a bit of nagging around you can get even people who don't understand what VCS are to use it. The one time they ruin the code and get the chance to easily go back to how things were before they'll see its value and endlessly thank you for it.

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