Beijing Olympic and possibly first Gold for Malaysia

This is a bad time to be at the end of a PhD. I'm so tied up with writing and correction with the thesis that I hardly have time to watch the Olympic. Anyhow, I did watch the opening. It is just awesome! Telstra has this ads for Olympic that carries a song with this lyrics - "we are one, and we are many...." and I thought it's a very good reflection of the drummers, the Taichi performers and many others at the Beijing Olympic opening.

I also think that the concept of a painting 'drawn' by the dancers, the kids and all the athletes is just brilliant. However, the last minute change from the super-sweet -voice singer to the super-cute-looking singer by direction of high official is a bit of a shame.

Actually this post is about tonight man's badminton final between Lee Chong Wei (Msia) and Lin Dan (China). Malaysia had never won gold in Olympic and tonight may be the first time the national anthem of Malaysia being played in Olympic ceremony. Lee Chong Wei is in good form, so is Lin Dan. Actually Lin Dan is on fire and won all his games in this Olympic in straight 2 games. They played each other many times before and Lee always win when the game is in home ground.

It's sad that Australia TV doesn't broadcast it! Why did SBS broadcast woman's badminton final but not man's?

Anyhow, I hope Lee Chong Wei will win for Malaysia, like what he did for the Sudirman Cup 2007. Go Lee Chong Wei!!

Making Google Street View into 3D

I was very excited about Google Street View in Australia. I think in a computer vision point of view, it provides such a huge amount of usable multiple views data to play with.

One idea I have is to:
1. Run the SIFT descriptor (by David Lowe) over the photos along one street to grab the interest points,
2. Ran RANSAC with rather loose tolerance to find homography match, and classify regions into planar surfaces. Maybe some super pixel algorithm will be useful to grow small region into bigger one based on colour information.
3. Transform the Street View into a 3D cardboard style walk through like the Photo Popup I mentioned before.

I think it would work. And because we know it's on a street, there are many constraints that can be added like we know the ground under is flat and it's pretty much sky on top kind of things.

If you're reading this and implement the algorithm and got a paper published or something, just give me an honourary mention will do. ;)

On a non-technical note, here is one place that it didn't quite work out on Street View. There's clearly a road there, but it didn't show it.



Or on Street View live:

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Google Street view in Australia!

Google gets down and detailed on the street where you live


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If you know where I live, you can even see my Daihatsu parked on the side of the road. Haha! That's pretty cool.