

Source for Predator Object Tracking (OpenCV) - helwr
https://github.com/abelsson/TLD/

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mrleinad
IMHO, Zdenek Kalal has some short sighted view for business. Even if someone
offered him a plane filled with money for his algorithm, or if he thought
"hey, I can sell this shit! fuck the world! show me the money!", he fails at
acknowledging that it doesn't really matter whether you created one of the
best algorithms for image recognition: what matters is if you can do it again.

What I'm talking about is, what if instead of selling one of the golden eggs,
you give that for free and create a reputation for yourself worldwide, so more
people will be willing to hire the golden egg's goose?

Anyway.. Somewhere, Richard Stallman is smiling.. and I'm happy for that.

~~~
helwr
Some people make things just because they love to make things.

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lwat
Well he got a PhD for this one, that's something.

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helwr
Follow-up on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403290>

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helper
Predator Object Tracking explanation:
[http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/predator-takes-visual-
obj...](http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/predator-takes-visual-object-
tracking-to-new-heights-2011044/)

~~~
SandB0x
I'm not sure that counts as an explanation :) For details you could read his
published papers on the subject:

[http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/20...](http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/2010_icip.pdf)

[http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/20...](http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/2010_icpr.pdf)

[http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/20...](http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/2010_cvpr.pdf)

[http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/20...](http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/Publications/2009_olcv.pdf)

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SammoJ
You will need at least the image processing toolbox and statistics toolbox for
MATLAB to run the code.

~~~
sparky
And at least version R2009B, to get the new syntax for unused function
arguments or return values ("~"). Otherwise, search and replace them with
dummy variable names to get it to run. Should just take a couple minutes.

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weaksauce
I thought he wasn't releasing this... why is Henrik Abelsson releasing this
and not Zdeneki Kalai?

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wladimir
He already released it, and once you release something under GPL you can't
take it back. You can stop hosting it, but someone else is free to develop
further on it.

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SandB0x
Even so, I'm not sure this is a polite thing to do. I think it would be nice
to respect the author's wishes for the moment:

 _We have received hundreds of emails asking for the source code ranging from
practitioners, students, researchers up to top companies. The range of
proposed projects is exciting and it shows that TLD is ready to push the
current technology forward. This shows that we have created something "bigger"
than originally expected and therefore we are going to postpone the release of
our source code until announced otherwise. Thank you for understanding._

<http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html>

However as most of the tracking code is in Matlab - i.e. you can't just port
this to your phone - I don't think the author has a great deal to lose here.
If someone wants to re-implement the algorithms they may well need his
expertise. (Edit: Looking at the code in more detail SammoJ may well be right,
and this paragraph may be wrong.)

In fact, Henrik Abelsson may have more to lose if this is seen as poor
etiquette, but I'm speculating here.

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SammoJ
Translating MATLAB -> C isn't too bad and could be done without any domain
knowledge. Just remember the pesky 1 start for MATLAB arrays... Having a quick
glance through the code I haven't seen any major reliance on MATLAB built-ins.
Also "most of the tracking code is in MATLAB" is false. The tracking builds
upon the Lucas-Kanade tracker in lk.cpp which uses OpenCVs implementation. I'd
estimate a couple of full days of work tops to re-write in C.

Qualifications: I have had to speed up (i.e. rewrite in C) a lot of complex
MATLAB code.

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icandoitbetter
Is anyone seriously considering porting this to C? I'm thinking of doing this
myself, as I'm really interested in applying the algorithm, but I don't have a
lot of experience in this kind of thing.

~~~
liuliu
I am thinking of porting his code to ccv (<http://github.com/liuliu/ccv>).
Unfortunately, his code is released under GPLv2, and ccv is BSD licensed. I
have sent email to him in order to obtain further permission.

~~~
windsurfer
Could you release a GPLv2 CCV library for the time being?

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helwr
Official source: <https://github.com/zk00006/OpenTLD>

