noio

Marceline Wallpaper

Tom — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:01:58 +0000

This is a desktop wallpaper featuring Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time. I’m not claiming any originality here, all I did was take a frame from Episode 201: “It Came from the Nightosphere” and trace it to make it suitable for a high-res monitor. Adventure Time is owned by Cartoon Network. Click the image for 1920×1080, if you want a different size or background color, leave a comment!

Untitled Wallpaper

Tom — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:37:18 +0000

I usually don’t upload photos or wallpapers, but here you go. I just made the 1440×900 version for my MacBook, but leave a comment if you’d like to have another size.

Pixen Icon

Tom — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:27:36 +0000

Made this icon for the only decent pixel editor on Mac OS X: Pixen.

The End of a Day

Tom — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:27:18 +0000

I was thinking of moving some of the stuff I’ve posted up on my deviantArt account to this website, because I might have outgrown dA a little bit heh. So here is the first. I’ve never spent so much time in Illustrator as I did on this one, but I’m surprised that it worked. It’s titled “The End of a Day”.

Vimeo Account and More

Tom — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:50:00 +0000

So I created a Vimeo account and I wanted to show off some of my progress in pixelarting backgrounds for a game I’m working on. Enjoy!

And another one.

Cardbox Design

Tom — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 10:50:36 +0000

Some shots of a (language) learning website I’m developing. I’m about to make the interaction a lot simpler, but I wanted to show of the old design first.

Stitching Smiles

Tom — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:36:50 +0000

For a project in our MSc Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, Gilles de Hollander and me implemented a new system for automatically fixing group portraits. You are probably familiar with the situation of trying to take a good picture of a group of people, what usually happens is that not everyone is smiling at the same time, people look away, they have their eyes closed, etc. We used computer vision techniques to automatically combine a series of ‘bad’ group portraits into a single good one, where everybody smiles.

An example of a group portrait where not everybody was smiling at once.

Step One: Finding Faces

This was the easiest part of the project. Face detection has pretty much been solved. The Viola-Jones object detection works more than well enough for our needs. You can download many different implementations of the Viola-Jones algorithms, we used the one included in OpenCV.

Results of the face detection

Step Two: Rating Smiles

Now that we know where the faces are, it’s time for the real A.I. task: judging whether the faces are smiling or not. I’ll give a quick rundown of how that works. We collected and labeled about 6000 images of smiling and “not smiling” people and we trained a so-called support vector machine. As preprocessing, we computed the histogram of oriented gradients of each image (refer to the report for more details). The SVM can then assign scores or ratings to each face. We use these ratings to sort the faces, and pick the most smiling face for each person in the image.

Smile ratings for frames of a movie displayed as bars.

Step Three: Stitching it all back together

The third and final step is to take the areas from the photos that were indicated to be smiling faces, and stitch these back together into a neat looking composite. We have to find places where we can cut the image without creating a visible seam. Obviously, just pasting the smiling faces onto the non-smiling faces will give conspicuous artifacts, as you can see in the following image.

Just pasting the smiling faces doesn't quite cut it.

The state-of-the-art methods for image segmentation use a method called minimum graph cut. As an input you can define a map of “costs” that indicates where the seams can be put without being obtrusive. The min-cut max-flow algorithm then finds the best “cut” through the image.

Blue areas were taken from picture A, green areas from picture B.

As a final touch we apply a tiny bit of blending to the edges. We applied the procedure to a set that includes the two pictures at the beginning of the post plus two more images and the result is shown below.

The resulting image: everyone is smiling!

Conclusion

This whole procedure requires no setup or intervention, you can just put in the group shots in one end, and a neat composite comes out the other end in less than a minute. We feel that this method could be used for a special “group shot mode” in digital cameras. This mode would take multiple shots and composite them all at the press of a single button. We are also looking at the feasibility of turning this project into an iPhone App. If you want to know more about the exact implementation, read the report.

Dixel’s TD

Tom — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:11:32 +0000

Yesterday Popobawa and me released our map for Starcraft II, called Dixel’s TD. It’s a remake of a classic WCIII map of the same name.

The goal of the map is to beat all 26 waves as fast as possible. You can do this by building your maze at the start of the lane. However, monsters lose health gradually as they walk through the lane, so when you build at the front, you have to take down the strongest monsters. Building at the back is safer, but you will be a lot slower.

You have to take into account the different kinds of monsters that spawn, in order to build a maze that is effective against each wave.

It’s published on the EU battle.net servers, so go ahead and give it a try! Just search for “dixel”.

Many thanks to Dixel for the original WCIII version!

Rubble: Update

Tom — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:43:24 +0000

So I’m still working on a little flash game. It’s a game where you play a tank and make your way through some levels where aliens will try to blow you up while you solve the physics puzzles. I thought I’d do a little update, partly for your enjoyment, partly for my motivation. To start you off, here are some screenshots.

The Major will give you instructions every now and then.

You can order some construction materials to get through the level.

You can also order some heavier firepower.

Airstrike!

I also did some music snippets for each level in the game. One of them, for the first level, is below.

Colourlovers Background Patterns

Tom — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 15:14:02 +0000

Setting a Random Colourlovers Background Pattern

Hooray for APIs! I wrote a function that gives your site a random background pattern, picked from the top rated patterns on Colourlovers. You’re seeing it in action on this page!

function setRandomColourloversBackground(element){
    var r = new Request.JSONP({
        'url':'http://www.colourlovers.com/api/patterns/top',
        'callbackKey':'jsonCallback',
        'data':{'format':'json','numResults':25},
        'onSuccess':function(j){
            patterns = Array.from(j);
            pattern = patterns.getRandom();
            url = "url('"+pattern.imageUrl+"')"
            $(element).setStyle('background',url)
        }
    }).send();
}

It’s picked from the top 25 patterns, but you could change that.