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Decorative imag.

As part of my final coursework for Machine Vision with Prof. BKP Horn, I implemented a simple 'shape from shading' algorithm described in Horn's Robot Vision and ran it on some underwater 'test' images. I implemented it as a plugin for the Blender 3D modelling program.

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The screencast shows loading a shading image (on the right) from a PNG file, setting up parameters, and then selecting the outermost nodes on a sample 3D 'cap' which is used as a starting approximation for the shape. Each node in the initial set is extended at each timestep according to Horn's algorithm.

The plugin worked successfully on some synthetic scenes, but did not work as effectively on real-world scenes. This is due in part to the complexity of the Shape-from-Shading problem, the difficulty of the real-world images I used, and a few remaining bugs in the code.

This plugin is no longer under active development, but I'd be happy to work with anybody who wants to develop it further. I have not yet licensed it under any license, but would happily license it under a variety of open source licenses if somebody wanted to take the project forward. Please contact me if you'd like to do so.