Time to explore something outside my comfort zone. Image Processing.  I’ve gone through a few geek books during hard to find spare time. There are so many apps in the iOS world that I needed to dig a little deeper to get a better understanding what is under the hood.  iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide and Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide are good introductions. If you know C/C++ the Objective C book can be read rather quickly. I liked going through the exercises in the iOS programming book (well kindle version) to force me to navigate through the xcode/iOS documentation.  My real motivation is to do some image processing and opted to read the OpenCV 2 Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook.

I got  a “hello world” to work on the iPhone, Macbook Air, and Ubuntu 12.04 running under Oracle Virtual Box for Windows. I got something going on the Macbook Air to perform basic motion tracking and facial recognition over a video stream through the built-in camera. OpenCV makes this rather trivial.  There a lot of threads out there for getting open CV installed under Ubuntu of which this one gave me the best results. The following is the output from a program to detect faces against a picture downloaded from the web compiled in an Eclipse environment. I wanted to ensure my dev environment was in working order.

Now What? Well, time to roll up the sleeves and dust off the math and start exploring. I purchased a gopro cam as everywhere I go we are under constant surveillance. Time for sousveillance  coined by Steve Mann.