GymCam Knows Exactly What You’ve Been Doing In The Gym

Getting exact statistics on one’s physical activities at the gym, is not an easy feat. While most people these days are familiar with or even regularly use one of those motion-based trackers on their wrist, there’s a big question as to their accuracy. After all, it’s all based on the motions of just one’s wrist, which as we know leads to amusing results in the tracker app when one does things like waving or clapping one’s hands, and cannot track leg exercises at the gym.

To get around the issue of limited sensor data, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA) developed a system based around a camera and machine vision algorithms. While other camera solutions that attempt this suffer from occlusion while trying to track individual people as accurately as possible, this new system instead doesn’t try to track people’s joints, but merely motion at specific exercise machines by looking for repetitive motion in the scene.

The basic concept is that repetitive motion usually indicates forms of exercise, and that no two people at the same type of machine will ever be fully in sync with their motions, so that merely a handful of pixels suffice to track motion at that machine by a single person. This also negates many privacy issues, as the resolution doesn’t have to be high enough to see faces or track joints with any degree of accuracy.

In experiments at the university’s gym, the accuracy of their system over 5 days and 42 hours of video. Detecting exercise activities in the scene was with a 99.6% accuracy, disambiguating between simultaneous activities was 84.6% accurate, while recognizing exercise types was 93.6% accurate. Ultimately repetition counts for specific exercises were within 1.7 counts.

Maybe an extended version of this would be a flying drone capturing one’s outside activities, giving one finally that 100% accurate exercise account while jogging?

Thanks to [Qes] for sending this one in!

3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back To Life

There is a treasure trove of history locked away in closets and attics, where old shoeboxes hold reels of movie film shot by amateur cinematographers. They captured children’s first steps, family vacations, and parties where [Uncle Bill] was getting up to his usual antics. Little of what was captured on thousands of miles of 8-mm and Super 8 film is consequential, but giving a family the means to see long lost loved ones again can be a powerful thing indeed.

That was the goal of [Anton Gutscher]’s automated 8-mm film scanner. Yes, commercial services exist that will digitize movies, slides, and snapshots, but where’s the challenge in that? And a challenge is what it ended up being. Aside from designing and printing something like 27 custom parts, [Anton] also had a custom PCB fabricated for the control electronics. Film handling is done with a stepper motor that moves one frame into the scanner at a time for scanning and cropping. An LCD display allows the archivist to move the cropping window around manually, and individual images are strung together with ffmpeg running on the embedded Raspberry Pi. There’s a brief clip of film from a 1976 trip to Singapore in the video below; we find the quality of the digitized film remarkably good.

Hats off to [Anton] for stepping up as the family historian with this build. We’ve seen ad hoc 8-mm digitizers before, but few this polished looking. We’ve also featured other archival attempts before, like this high-speed slide scanner.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back To Life”

AI Recognizes And Locks Out Murder Cats

Anyone with a cat knows that the little purring ball of fluff in your lap is one tiny step away from turning into a bloodthirsty serial killer. Give kitty half a chance and something small and defenseless is going to meet a slow, painful end. And your little killer is as likely as not to show off its handiwork by bringing home its victim – “Look what I did for you, human! Are you not proud?”

As useful as a murder-cat can be, dragging the bodies home for you to deal with can be – inconvenient. To thwart his adorable serial killer [Metric], Amazon engineer [Ben Hamm] turned to an AI system to lock his prey-laden cat out of the house. [Metric] comes and goes as he pleases through a cat flap, which thanks to a solenoid and an Arduino is now lockable. The decision to block entrance to [Metric] is based on an Amazon AWS DeepLens AI camera, which watches the approach to the cat flap. [Ben] trained three models: one to determine if [Metric] was in the scene, one to determine whether he’s coming or going, and one to see if he’s alone or accompanied by a lifeless friend, in which case he’s locked out for 15 minutes and an automatic donation is made to the Audubon Society – that last bit is pure genius. The video below is a brief but hilarious summary of the project for an audience in Seattle that really seems quite amused by the whole thing.

So your cat isn’t quite the murder fiend that [Metric] is? An RFID-based cat door might suit your needs better.

Continue reading “AI Recognizes And Locks Out Murder Cats”

Automated Dice Tester Uses Machine Vision To Ensure A Fair Game

People take their tabletop games very, very seriously. [Andrew Lauritzen], though, has gone far above and beyond in pursuit of a fair game. The game in question is Star War: X-Wing, a strategy wargame where miniature pieces are moved according to rolls of the dice. [Andrew] suspected that commercially available dice were skewing the game, and the automated machine-vision dice tester shown in the video after the break was the result.

The rig is a very clever design that maximizes the data set with as little motion as possible. The test chamber is a box with clear ends that can be flipped end-for-end by a motor; walls separate the chamber into four channels to test multiple dice on each throw, and baffles within the channels assure randomization. A webcam is positioned below the chamber to take a snapshot of each “throw”, which is then analyzed in OpenCV. This scheme has the unfortunate effect of looking at the dice from the table’s perspective, but [Andrew] dealt with that in true hacker fashion: he ignored it since it didn’t impact the statistics he was interested in.

And speaking of statistics, he generated a LOT of them. The 62-page report of results from his study is an impressive piece of work, which basically concludes that the dice aren’t fair due to manufacturing variability, and that players could use this fact to cheat. He recommends pooled sets of dice to eliminate advantages during competitive play. 

This isn’t the first automated dice roller we’ve seen around these parts. There was the tweeting dice-bot, the Dice-O-Matic, and all manner of electronic dice throwers. This one goes the extra mile to keep things fair, and we appreciate that.

Continue reading “Automated Dice Tester Uses Machine Vision To Ensure A Fair Game”

Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean

Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races. What this means is that using a single camera and onboard processing, this little drone with a diameter of 10 centimeters has to navigate the course, while avoiding obstacles.

To achieve this goal, they took an Eachine trashcan drone, replacing its camera with an open source JeVois smart machine vision camera and the autopilot software with the Paparazzi open UAV software. Naturally, scaling a racing drone down to this size came at an obvious cost: with its low-quality sensors, relatively low-quality camera and limited processing power compared to its big brothers it has to rely strongly on algorithms that compensate for drift and other glitches while racing.

Currently the drone is mainly being tested at a four-gate race track at TU Delft’s Cyberzoo, where it can fly multiple laps at a leisurely two meters per second, using its gate-detecting algorithms to zip from gate to gate. By using machine vision to do the gate detection, the drone can deal with gates being displaced from their position indicated on the course map.

While competitive with other, much larger autonomous racing drones, the system is still far removed from the performance of human-controlled racing drones. To close this gap, MAVLab’s [Christophe De Wagter] mentions that they’re looking at improving the algorithms to make them better at predictive control and state estimation, as well as the machine vision side. Ideally these little drones should be able to be far more nimble and quick than they are today.

See a video of the drone in action after the link.

Continue reading “Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean”

Automate The Freight: Amazon’s Robotic Packaging Lines

In the “Automate the Freight” series, I’ve concentrated on stories that reflect my premise that the killer app for self-driving vehicles will not be private passenger cars, but will more likely be the mundane but necessary task of toting things from place to place. The economics of replacing thousands of salary-drawing and benefit-requiring humans in the logistics chain are greatly favored compared to the profits to be made by providing a convenient and safe commuting experience to individuals. Advances made in automating deliveries will eventually trickle down to the consumer market, but it’ll be the freight carriers that drive innovation.

While I’ve concentrated on self-driving freight vehicles, there are other aspects to automating the supply chain that I’ve touched on in this series, from UAV-delivered blood and medical supplies to the potential for automating the last hundred feet of home delivery with curb-to-door robots. But automation of the other end of the supply chain holds a lot of promise too, both for advancing technology and disrupting the entire logistics field. This time around: automated packaging lines, or how the stuff you buy online gets picked and wrapped for shipping without ever being touched by human hands.

Continue reading “Automate The Freight: Amazon’s Robotic Packaging Lines”