Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Newton's Method Fractal Yet Again

Yet another Newton's Method Fractal Animation. This one is created from the OpenGL C++ program I wrote some time ago on my Macbook Pro. I dumped the frames as PPMs, used ImageMagick to convert them to pngs (shell script one liner), FrameByFrame (A great free OS X product) to make a movie from frames, and iMovie to add music/titles. The song in the background is a New Deal cover of Journey's Separate Ways from 2003-02-21 (Check it out on archive.org).



In the future I plan on synchronizing the music with the fractals. Here is a cool screenshot from the movie when the background becomes white.

Friday, December 05, 2008

Using Computer Vision to Solve Jigsaw Puzzles

This past Thanksgiving I took a little bit of time to see if I could solve Jonathan Huang's Puzzle. While I haven't yet solved the task since I could only afford to put a couple of hours of work into it, here is a nice debug screenshot of the local puzzle piece alignment strategy I've been pursuing.

In this image I've shown puzzle piece A which is fixed and in red, and puzzle piece B as well as some likely transformations that when applied to B snap it to piece A. If I have more time over Xmas break and I get to finish the final puzzle -- I'll be sure to post the details.