Vision-List-Request@ADS.COM (Vision-List moderator Phil Kahn) (06/12/91)
VISION-LIST Digest Tue Jun 11 12:36:59 PDT 91 Volume 10 : Issue 27 - Send submissions to Vision-List@ADS.COM - Vision List Digest available via COMP.AI.VISION newsgroup - If you don't have access to COMP.AI.VISION, request list membership to Vision-List-Request@ADS.COM - Access Vision List Archives via anonymous ftp to ADS.COM Today's Topics: Associative memory for image retrieval Cheap IJCAI91 airfares available (but not for long) Position Wanted BMVA Technical Meeting DATACUBE info. responses (very long) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 7 Jun 91 10:51:55 GMT From: wu@canon.co.uk Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK Subject: associative memory for image retrieval I am trying to collect information about the use of associative memory for fast image storage and retrieval. Any reference to the topic is welcome. I will summarize responses. Many thanks. S.F. Wu wu@canon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Jun 91 18:00:42 EDT From: mostow@cs.rutgers.edu Subject: Cheap IJCAI91 airfares available (but not for long) For those of you planning to attend IJCAI-91 in Sydney, Australia, it may be important to know that there are extremely discounted round-trip airfares to/from the US and Sydney available right now. Both Continental and Northwest are offering $685 (+ tax = $703) round-trip fares from JFK and Newark. Both these fares *expire soon* (Continental on June 7th and Northwest the following week) so, if you're interested in taking advantage of the savings, call your travel agent immediately! Your local travel agent should have further details and be able to make the arrangements for you. I DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER INFORMATION, SO PLEASE DO ***NOT*** CONTACT ME. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 5 Jun 91 12:35:46 BST From: UCL Image Processing Group <ucipg@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk> Subject: Position Wanted POSITION WANTED I am seeking a software engineering position in the field of computer vision with a U.S. based company or research institution. I am a U.S. citizen and am about to complete a PhD in image processing. I have extensive experience in parallel processing (both SIMD and MIMD) as applied to image processing and computer graphics. Please contact me for further details. PhD Image Processing University College London MSc Computer Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute BSc Computer Information Science University of Massachusetts Shawn Javid 100014.1731@compuserve.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jun 91 12:21:17 BST From: J.Illingworth@ee.surrey.ac.uk Subject: BMVA Technical Meeting BRITISH MACHINE VISION ASSOCIATION and SOCIETY FOR PATTERN RECOGNITION ADVANCED TECHNIQUES FOR IMAGE CODING Technical Meeting to be held on Tuesday 16 July 1991 at British Institute of Radiology, 36 Portland Place, London. Chairman: Professor Peter Saraga (Philips Research, Redhill.) 10.15 Arrive and coffee 10.45 Welcome and introduction. P. Sarage, Philips Research. 10:50 Standards for digital video coding. Dr O.J. Morris, Philips Research Labs. 11:25 Combinatorial Optimisation Techniques for Image Coding. Prof A. Constantinides, Imperial College. 12:00 Image Coding and Low Level Vision Dr R. Wilson, Univ of Warwick. 12.35 LUNCH 14.15 Block Based Fractal Image Coding. Dr J. Waite, British Telecom. 14.50 Model Based Image Coding. Prof. D. Pearson, Univ of Essex. 15:25 TEA 15:55 Model Based Coding for Low Bitrate Video Telephony. Dr Stanger, G.E.C. Hirst Research. 16:30 Development of Motion Estimation and Compression Schemes for Image Sequence Coding. Prof. R. Clarke, Heriot-Watt Univ. 17:05 Close Dr. J. Illingworth, | Phone: (0483) 300-800 Ext. 2299 V.S.S.P. Group, | Fax : (0483) 300-803 Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng, | Email: J.Illingworth@ee.surrey.ac.uk University of Surrey, | Guildford, | Surrey GU2 5XH | United Kingdom | ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Jun 91 10:36:23 EDT From: nar@cs.wayne.edu Subject: Summary of DATACUBE info. responses Status: RO Hi Folks, The following is the summary of responses that I received about DATACUBE systems. I thank the people who responded once again. [ Lengthy responses were posted, and I am posting them below. However, David Coombs noted that there is a List devoted to the Datacube that is operated by Matthew Turk. In the future, please direct all Datacube inquiries to the datacube-list: "Everyone responded positively to the Datacube list idea, so here it is! I think things are set up properly so that mailing to "datacube-list@media-lab.media.mit.edu" will send your message to the groups at MIT (the Media Lab and the MIT AI Lab), Harvard, and Rochester. Hitting "r" (or the equivalent in whatever mailer you use) should reply to everyone. "I think we should feel free to have public Q & A's -- the point is that I can benefit from your discussions (and hopefully vice-versa). I will feel free to exhibit my ignorance of Suns, Datacube, and life in general, if you folks will be considerate and gentle in your responses! As always, we should try not to burden each other with questions that are answered in the first page of the manuals -- but also let's keep in mind how bad the Datacube manuals are and realize that sometimes we'll have missed something along the way. "I had also promised a summary of MAGICAL. MAGICAL is a package developed by Boeing (High Tech Center), which allows a Sun or Symbolics user to control Datacube hardware, including a bunch of commands to do initialization, I/O, image operations, graphics, feature extraction, etc. If our lawyers ever get their act together, we will be getting a preliminary copy of MAGICAL to evaluate. At which time I'll offer my opinions. It looks very promising, but I have many unanswered questions about it. If you'd like a copy of the pre-release manual, I'll send one, or talk to Charlotte Lin at Boeing. "So that's all, folks. The ball's in your respective courts now! Matthew Turk" phil...] ************************** Subject: DATACUBE Here is some information about our DATACUBE setup. We use two different setups. setup 1)It is built around the following datacube boards (cost: approx 10K$can): -Digimax: image A/D D/A digitizing board (frame digitizer) -ROI-Store (2M): Region of interest frame buffer two-megabytes. (used to store digital data acquired with Digimax) -Maxware software. This setup is used for image acquisition. The two VME-boards are mounted in a 9-slot VME backplane. The backplane is connected to a SUN-3/110 through a VME-to-VME bus repeater (PT-VME 910 by Performance technologies). This setup works fine and is very reliable. I must point out that the Maxware software will no longer be supported by Datacube and will be replaced by the Imageflow software. Datacube hardware works fine but requires some installation efforts!!! Setup 2: It is built around the following boards (total cost: 45K$ can) -Digimax: image A/D D/A digitizing board (frame digitizer) -ROI-Store (2M): Region of interest frame buffer two-megabytes. (used to store digital data acquired with Digimax) -Maxware software. -VFIR MK-II real-time convolver -MaxMux for data switching and real-time table look-up -Euclid general purpose signal processing DSP board. -VME-VME bus repeater and Sun-3/110 We are currently porting this setup on a Sun-4 IPC workstation using a S-bus to VME-bus repeater (Performance Technologies). It is not completely re-installed however. We are also contemplating the purchase of a Datacube University package B (43% off) sold for 20K$US: -7-slot VME chassis with power supply and nice carrying case -Digimax -Roi-store 2M -2 out of the three following boards: -VFIR MK-II -Featuremax -Max-SP (low cost signal processor) -a 68030 motorola master board processor -Imageflow software (with 5-day training course) -OS-9 operating system -Ethernet link -SCSI hard disk drive We are going to use this setup for a robotics application. Hope this information will be of any help. Sincerely yours Dr Denis Laurendeau professor Computer Vision and Digital Systems Laboratory Department of Electrical Engineering Laval University Quebec City, Province of Quebec Canada, G1K 7P4 phone: (418) 656-2979, Fax: (418) 656-3594 e-mail: laurend@gel.ulaval.ca P.S. 1 : I do not work for Datacube!!! P.S. 2 : Laval University is a French Speaking campus attended by 30K students. This explains the poor quality of my English!!! ************************** Subject: VISION-LIST digest 10.25 We have been using Datacube MAXVIDEO hardware since the mid 80's and I still feel that the MAXVIDEO line has one of the best cost/performance tradeoffs available FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE systems, i.e. where deterministic image processing at TV frame rates or faster is required. If you only need to do morphological, convolutions, fourier transforms, etc. in the seconds or tens of second time-frame, you might consider a hardware system with better software support (see below) or a software only system. (Khoros for example.) While the MAXVIDEO hardware is a advantage in some cases, the major difficulty is the USE of that hardware, or equivalently the software. IMAGEFLOW is Datacube's software solution to the control of their hardware. While it is better than the preceeding MAXWARE product, there still seems to be a lot lacking in terms of technical user support and support for real-time (inter-frame or millisecond rate) operations. I do not like OS-9 as an operating system despite (or perhaps because of) years of use. OS9 is a peculiar mixture of DOS, UNIX and VMS commands which is recommended only because there are no good alternatives for fast, stand-alone operating systems on generic VME equipment. I much prefer developing/debugging in a workstation environment with interactive control of the MAXVIDEO hardware via a Bit 3 bus repeater. This gives me a good debugger, a UNIX front end, and the ability to use familiar tools, utilities and flags. If you are interested in system installation away from a SUN or other UNIX workstation, I have heard good things about VRTX. Back to using MAXVIDEO with a Sparc 2, I know that Bit 3 has a Sbus to VME bus convertor and while I haven't used it, the convertor/repeater approach would, in my estimation, be preferable to learning and having to support OS9. Check with Bit 3 (612) 881-6955 and SUN to see if SPARC 2's SUNOS comes with VME bus drivers. My recommendation is to use a SUN or whatever workstation with the MAXVIDEO hardware tied "directly" (via Bit 3) to the workstation backplane. To effectively use MAXVIDEO software, interactive control of the software is also essential, which is NOT directly supported by IMAGEFLOW. At least one third party vendor (below) provides easier to use environments than IMAGEFLOW. We rolled our own enviornment orginally which I do not recommend if at all possible. Adaptive Automation - makes REAL - software access library for MAXVIDEO boards (203) 289-9356 ************************** Subject: Info. needed about DATACUBE I'm a programmer/analyst for a group at Cedar-Sinai hospital which is using DATACUBE products to build a workstation environment to study perception. We also use the boards to digitize RS-170 signals. We have a digimax (RS-170 D<->A), a maxview D to A (combines sun-video with the image stored in the viewmem), and a 2-Mb viewmem board. We have the boards in a sun-4/370 (pedestal), though it would have been worth it to get the card cage, since it is otherwise quite difficult to remove boards ---all the boards have to be removed at once since they're cabled together with a proprietary bus. And we had to remove the boards multiple times, though once set up correctly this is not a consideration. The hardware manuals are buggy and difficult to use. Our field-help is so-so. The software manuals are ok. It took us about a month and a half (not full time) to get the hardware set up correctly and figure out the right software parameters. System integration is not fun. You might have to talk to Sun to find out certain details about the Sun's video output timing, information which the boards must be given via software. On the good side, though, the boards seem quite flexible in terms of how they can be configured in hardware (busses) and software, and the video signals they can deal with. We have just begun using the boards in the last week or two, and do not do image processing on them --we have no processing boards right now, just the abovementioned digitizing and mixing boards. Hope this helps. David A. Honig Email: honig@ics.uci.edu c/o Dept. of Info. & Comp. Sci. Univ. of California Irvine, Ca. 92717 (714) 856-7310 c/o Dep't Med Physics and Imaging, Cedar Sinai Med Center 8700 Beverly Blvd, L.A., Ca (213) 855-2343 ************************** Subject: DATACUBE Hardware We are running DataCube hardware using a Sparc 1+. The hardware is in what they call a MAXBOX. It is connected to the Sun with a VME to Sbus converter. We went the 'easy' but expensive way for using the equipment. We went through a 3rd party systems integrator who has developed their own code for accessing the stuff using UNIX commands and C-callable libraries. Contact Steve Case at Inovision Inc. in Research Triangle, NC for more information. His phone number is (919)361-4609. Brent Richburg University of Illinois Agricultural Engineering Department 1304 West Pennsylvania Avenue Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 333-9415 office 244-4179 lab 244-0323 fax ************************** Subject: Re: Info. needed about DATACUBE I was a student at the University of Rochester. There we had many datacube boards hooked up to a Sun 3/260 (with VME bus), and later a Sun 4 also with a VME bus. Despite the work involved with dealing with the incomplete and sometimes inaccurate documentation, the Datacube was a great success, and a big part of our push towards Active Vision. I personally used it to run my color histogram algorithms. I believe that Greg Shiu at Wayne State has my thesis, Color Indexing, which shows the Datacube setup for that. Here at the University of Chicago, we have a Digicolor and a Framestore, and will be getting a loaded Maxvideo-20 board, when Datacube is able to make them right. (They've been telling us for about two months that it's coming 'next week', but their production problems have persisted.) The M-20 board combines a number of the old boards into one double-width board at a significantly lower price. (But note they've recently lowered the price on their old boards.) It also has a cross-bar switch which means you can change algorithms instantly from software instead of rewiring the cables ... which was a real pain with the old boards. We're using a Performance Technologies bus converter to attach the Bit3 VME cage we have to a Sparcstation. That's supported by Datacube for their ImageFlow software. We're just using Unix so far. I assume you have Glen Ahearn's number at Datacube? (508) 535-6644 Mike Swain ************************** Subject: Re: Info. needed about DATACUBE We have a bunch of datacube boards in a couple of VME chassis hosted by a sun 4/280. (The sparcstation does not offer a VME bus.) You would probably be interested in the new maxvideo-20 product, which essentially combines the functionality of several of the older boards on a double-wide VME board (mother board plus piggy-back). We have no experience with the maxvideo, however. Datacube's old software interface (MaxWare) to the maxvideo equipment was awkward and buggy. I'm told the new ImageFlow software package is much better, but being new still suffers from some bugs. We are using some homegrown code, but will probably move to ImageFlow if we get maxvideo-20s. ImageFlow is quite a piece of work, since it calculates all the timing for the image paths in the system, so if it works it's rather impressive. I just don't have experience. Please let me know what you find and what you end up doing. Dave Coombs (716) 275-9098 or 5671 ------------------------------ End of VISION-LIST digest 10.27 ************************