Flickr Mashups

The online photo sharing website Flickr has an API that some people have used to make some neat plug-ins, including image query-by-sketch: article
(thanks to David Torres for the link)

Emerging themes

One nice outcome of this course is that several common themes have emerged among the different student projects, and this has led to students exchanging code and ideas. Here are a few that come to mind:

- feature detection & description (e.g., SIFT)
- corner features vs. blob features (e.g., Harris/Förstner vs. MSER)
- windowed histograms as a powerful descriptor for color and texture
- planar homographies for image alignment
- pros and cons of different color spaces (RGB, LAB, etc.)
- mean shift clustering in feature space
- image segmentation as a preprocessing step (e.g. Felzenszwalb)
- distance vs. rank (metric vs. ordinal)
- properties of ellipses under transformation

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) Companies

Geoff Wolfe tipped me off to http://www.evisionglobal.com/, which appears to target the generic CBIR problem, in the tradition of QBIC, Blobworld, Virage, etc. (Or at least they did up until 2002 or so.) This site might be of interest to Boris and Nadav. In contrast, companies like Riya.com are targeting more specific visual queries, such as faces and text.

No luck so far with Blog Aggregation

This will be my first time integrating the use of blogs into a course. My plan is to have each student (or student team) maintain a project blog throughout the winter quarter.

Blogger.com makes this pretty easy, but I was hoping to have one aggregated blog that we could all check to get a quick impression of everyone's latest project news without clicking on each blog link individually. The obvious choice for this was Google Reader, but to my surprise, it doesn't seem to work! It recognizes that that blogs exist, but it incorrectly says there are no messages and to try again later. This seems bizarre, since this is all within the Google family.