Faraz M. Mirzaei

With Lasers and Flyovers, a 3D Map of New York

2011-09-17,

According to the New York Times, aerial Lidar scans of New York City are obtained to create a precise 3D map for planning and emergency response. Sanborn, a Colorado-based firm is hired to do this project for $450,000. The data is acquired from a plane flying at about 3500 feet throughout nine six-hour post-midnight flights. I don't know if the city officials are planning to use this for vehicular navigation, but this data would definitely be very useful for GPS-denied navigation in urban canyons.
I wonder if laser scans are going to be matched with aerial and ground photos to produce photo-realistic 3D maps.

ICRA 2010 is approaching!

2011-09-17,

This year ICRA will be held in Anchorage, AK, May 3-8, 2010. Joel Hesch will present a paper on Laser-aided Inertial Navigation (L-INS), coauthored by me, Gian Luca Mariottini, and Prof. Stergios Roumeliotis. In this paper, we have developed an indoor navigation system for the visually impaired which fuses measurements from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a laser scanner within a SLAM framework to track the position and orientation of the person.
I was in Anchorage for CVPR conference in June 2008. ICRA will be is in early May, so I expect the weather to be significantly colder.

RabbitVCS: TortoiseSVN for Ubuntu

2011-09-17,

For a long time, my Windows-using officemates were telling me how good is TortoiseSVN on Windows, and what great feature I'm missing by not using Windows. Indeed It was a pity that TortoiseSVN was not ported into Linux.

Well, good news: I recently found out about a new software that provides TortoiseSVN features for Ubuntu. It is called RabbitVCS, and seamlessly integrates with Nautilus. I guess its developer have named it RabbitVCS as compared to TortoiseSVN referring to The Tortoise and the Hare fable. Well, I hope this time the hare doesn't decide to take a nap :D.

The main benefit of RabbitVCS for me is that it always shows me on which projects I have local modifications, and I've not committed them yet. It has happened so many times that I find a bug in a code, and fix it, but then forget to commit it. Several month later when I need to see what I have locally, I need to ding into the code to see what are the local modifications are about.