Julien's fuzzy blog

This week-end I went to Hull to visit old fellows. That was great !

Appart from a couple of changes (Newland Avenue has been completely rebuilt and there is a new house in place of the Turn Pike), Hull remains the same: girls in ultra-mini skirts, insolent kids, car-boot-sales full of dodgy DVDs ...

We phoned to Dhowaihi, he's on honey moon ! Best wishes to him. Abdullah had also a great event to announce me, I let him tell you . Luli and Yan are about to move to Southend-on-Sea, 60km west of London.

The Chinese Dragon, dancing for the new year at the VIP party, 2 weeks ago.


Thanks to Maria for the picture.

Day after day I notice some more or less obvious drawbacks of my room:

• the underground noise and vibrations for sure
• the shower is often used exactly when I need it
• I've never said more than g' morning to my housemates
• the windows are single-glazed, alot of air leaks and moreover the central heating doesn't work between midnight and the early morning - the room's quite cold at 4am (1)
• I knew that my landlord was a bit strict (2), but yesterday I heard him shouting on somebody: "in this house live respectable people (3) ! So shut the fuckin' noise down !" (4)
• cooking onions in the room is not recommended when you know you'd better not open the window because of the temperature
• there's no oven to cook bourguignon beef, en gratin potatoes, lasagnas or black forest

I may then try to move at the end of my 6-month contract, ie. during summer.

(1) I actually sleep in my sleeping bag - don't the exact temperature, but I guess it's around 10°C, maybe less
(2) and you too, because you read my blog ...
(3) does that mean that I'm a respectable person ?
(4) err ... do the respectable people use the f-word ?

Well, I know it was 5 months ago... But I've found this morning this picture that reminds me the day when the HIVE was launched. Especially when I got confused between shortcuts and proper files. Therefore my demo in front of the media didn't work properly (no stereo effect, hopefully I think nobody noticed).


Picture taken by Tbo and published without his agreement...

An aerial picture of Thurloe Square where I'm living. You can see the railway of Circle and District lines appearing just beside (Piccadilly line is underground).


Picture assembly based on streetmap.co.uk photographs.

This week-end Rachel, Andy, Mike and me went to the Dartmoor National Park for hiking. That was great !

This is a desertic hilly moor, with virtually no trees, only pastures and heather fields but also ... peatlands and marshes. As there were no proper footpaths, we had to cross many times small streams and muddy terrain, more or less successfully I didn't imagine it was possible to find that kind of landscape in the south of England. The weather was quite nice, sometimes sunny, sometimes not, with a steady fresh wind.

On the way back, we saw a couple of roe-deers in a small wood. They may have escaped from a hound hunting by about 30 riders and 15 dogs we've previously seen in the moor.

We slept two nights in a 12e century stone-built listed loft-barn. It was lost in the middle of the country-side, accessible only by three-meter-width roads surrounded by stone walls and hedges (GPS is our friend). Despite a wood fire (that took more than one hour to catch...), it was a bit cold inside. Hopefully, the place was not dodgy at all.

I Hope to get pictures soon.

This morning when I went to the laundry, I met 58-year-old reformist protestant Scottish 16-times grand-father. In less that one hour, a steady speech stream learnt me that:

• I should go to church everyday, "because it's good for [me]"
• I should shave, because a good visual aspect is important in life
• I should do weights in order to get harder muscles to run the marathon
• I should remove my small items from the dryer before the end of the program
• Chelsea is a good football team
• Paris will get the 2012 Olympics, London won't
• French are nice and friends of Scottish, because both of them hate English
  (author's note: what the hell are we doing here then ?)
• "I'm a virgo" and "I'm a virgin" have different meanings
• I can get a massage for free after running
• Dartmoor is a dangerous place at night

The previous posts about my work here were quite narrow-minded, focussing on particular aspects. Hereafter a better overview.

This project is actually part of a larger scale project whose aims are numerous. One of those would be to profile the behaviour of people at home. This relies on a camera network which processes the images inline.

The part I am devoted to is a house simulator. This simulator should embed:

• a 3D model of the building to test a project before being build
• a camera network model to maximize the visibility field, evaluate the image processing time and simulate the computing power transfer between these devices
• a human model to test some behaviour recognition algorithms

On Sunday evening, the whole group was invited to a Chinese restaurant at Cockfosters to celebrate the Chinese New Year. That was great ! Good food, nice fellows, Dragon dancing and stuff like that.

Guang-Zhong introduced me to the group exactly when I was in the bathroom ...

I hope to get pictures soon.

Don't try to understand... You've been warned !

Phlegm
1. [n] inactivity; showing an unusual lack of energy
2. [n] expectorated matter; saliva mixed with discharges from the respiratory passages; in ancient and medieval physiology it was believed to cause sluggishness
3. [n] apathy demonstrated by an absence of emotional reactions
ex: "Rachel is kidding with phlegm."

I've just achieved the first goal of this pre-project: I've implemented a "visibility pyramid" method in order to detect whether or not an object is visible to the camera (based on the outline of previous coders).

The already implemented algorithm was based on classic ray-casting, that consists of sending rays from the camera to the object and detect a potential collision. The number of rays is obviously finite (this represents the resolution of the camera).

The algorithm I've implemented is completely different. It consists of creating pyramids which apex is the center of the camera and which base is a face of the model to track. If the face is partially obstructed by something, then the pyramid is cut to keep only the visible part of the object face. A recursive cutting of all the obstructed parts of the face is proceeded. Eventually the pyramid is either null and therefore the object is not visible or not null in which case the object is at least partially visible.

Is that clear ???

It's quite amazing to run in Hyde Park on a beautiful Sunday morning. The place is over-crowed by people walking with dogs and runners. And when yesterday at 11.30pm we saw a guy running near the park, I though that Hyde Park was a kind of runners' heaven. However, this morning my enthusiasm got down a little bit: at 7am it was a bit foggy, a bit rainy, a bit cold and there were not that much runners in the park ...

Well it's obvious, in London there are many many French. Of course, some of them go to Imperial College, I'm not the only one... But I've just met Pam, a good friend from high school that I've not seen till then (7 years ago) ! He's doing a MSc in computer science here. That kind of coincidence is just amazing.

By the way (© Dhowaihi) this reminds me that last year in a youth hostel of Edinburgh, I was sleeping in the same room than a guy that used to live in the French village beside mine 10 years ago ...

Today I started to code seriously. I base my code upon a Java project. The developer is excellent, but put a very few comments. 6 lines of comments at the beginning of a 200-line method... then nothing ! Moreover, the average variable name contains 4 characters, and if longer look anyway like "vdPthyInc" (real example). Wow !
Hopefully, this guy is just really kind and helpful, and answer to every question.
The other point is that I can't use libraries such as Java3D or OpenSceneGraph. So Im writing for the tenth time of my short programmer's life the vector cross product function, etc...

GRAND LAUNCH: Does God exist ? Plus free lunch !

After years and years saying 'no', it's not good for socializing and stuff like that, I finally surrendered. I think I didn't know anybody anymore that didn't have one ...
Yes, from now I own one of these small boxes with a keypad and a screen, containing a wave emitter/recepter, and that basically allows to talk to somebody from virtually anywhere. Gloups !

I had lunches with many people from the lab these days, and started to know who is who. Everybody seems very kind here. On the evenning we went to a Korean restaurant and that was great. I met more and more people, including runners, hikers... I've already been invited to go hiking in Dartmoor.

I finally found a room to rent very close to Imperial. The landlord lives here and seems a bit strict. The room is quite grey, but I'll change that with posters. Anyway that's fine, I've found in just 3 days !

Wow ! It's a pain in the neck to find a room to rent in London. I get fed up with that. The private accomodation office staff is really kind (I must admit it's often the case in UK), but their list of flats is not up-to-date at all. Everything has already gone !
While prospecting I had some nice people on the phone, but also some that asked me to phone back, so not to pay the call when they rent a single room in a family house for £542pcm (around 780¤/month). The same told me to speak slower (usually, I'm told to speak very slowly) because she couldn't understand me due to my "very strong accent"... Nevermind.

Tomorrow I should leave the hotel for a guest house at the opposite side of Hyde Park. If I can't find anything till next week, I think I will have to go to the university hall that is located 50min away (tube+foot). And buy a bike to avoid strikes, tubes failures, crowd, expensive tube cards and maybe to save some time.

These days, I've seen lots of people running/cycling in the streets with short or tight specific clothes (and even a girl running in mini-skirt...). This was sometimes a little too much, as if they just wanted to belong to a class of people with their clothing. As we say in French: the habit does not make the monk.
Anyway, this is totally different from Hull (Yorkshire) where I got stupid remarks/laughs virtually anytime I went for a run ! I don't know where to run yet, I'm more familiar with cross-country running... Along the Thames Rivers ? In Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens ?

I've arrived in London yesterday and I'm now living in a hotel near Victoria for 3 days. Looks cosy and weird at the same time to my French eyes, like most of that kind of 50-year-old British houses. Bible and kettle in every room. Then I should stay one week (maybe more) in a guest house near Hyde Park. This gives me at least 10 days to find a proper accomodation.
I still don't know exactly where to search for, as each person gave me different advice. Near the campus or not ? In an university hall or in the private sector ? Some told me it's easy to find, others not at all...


I've started to work on a mini-project that should last 2 months till the official beginning of the PhD. It's not directly related to medical imaging: it's about visibility detection. Given a 3D environment (eg. a house), a 3D model (eg. a human being) and a camera, the application should evaluate the visibility of the model in the environment by the camera (ie. basically if the model is in the camera field of view and not completely hidden by other objects). This could lead to an automated power on/off system for a set of cameras, in order to record video only when the considered model is visible.
I should base my application upon an undergraduate group's project coded in Java, but I'm already hesitating about starting back from scratch.

Hope I will meet my 'Londoner' friends soon and Hull's ones in the coming months.