sechzig Jahre Computergeschichte

Vor sechzig Jahren wurde der mechanische Speicher der Rechenmaschine Z1 fertiggestellt. Konrad Zuses Z1 und Z3, zwischen 1936 und 1941 gebaut, bestechen noch heute durch ihre Eleganz. Beide Maschinen hatten denselben logischen Aufbau und waren die ersten vollautomatischen, programmgesteuerten Rechenmaschinen der Welt. Das Papier beschreibt die Architektur von beiden Maschinen

The First Computer Program

In 1837, the first computer program in history was sketched by the renowned mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. It was a program for the Analytical Engine. The program consists of a sequence of arithmetical operations and the necessary variable addresses (memory locations) of the arguments and the result, displayed in tabular fashion, like a program trace. The program computes the solutions for a system of two linear equations in two unknowns.Comment: 8 pages, 4 table

Grasping bulky objects with two anthropomorphic hands

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper presents an algorithm to compute precision grasps for bulky objects using two anthropomorphic hands. We use objects modeled as point clouds obtained from a sensor camera or from a CAD model. We then process the point clouds dividing them into two set of slices where we look for sets of triplets of points. Each triplet must accomplish some physical conditions based on the structure of the hands. Then, the triplets of points from each set of slices are evaluated to find a combination that satisfies the force closure condition (FC). Once one valid couple of triplets have been found the inverse kinematics of the system is computed in order to know if the corresponding points are reachable by the hands, if so, motion planning and a collision check are performed to asses if the final grasp configuration of the system is suitable. The paper inclu des some application examples of the proposed approachAccepted versio

Entzerrung von Textdokumenten unter Verwendung von Thin-Plate-Spline

Viele Verfahren identifizieren zunächst Textzeilen und ermitteln anschließend über die Dokumentrandeigenschaften die notwenige Korrekturtransformation. Das in dieser Arbeit vorgestellte Verfahren benötigt keine Dokumentrandeigenschaften, sondern ermittelt die Dokumentorientierung anhand der Buchstabenausrichtungen. Als Interpolationmethode wird Thin-Plate-Spline verwendet

A note on calibration of video cameras for autonomous vehicles with optical flow

We show how to compute the extrinsic parameters of a video camera from the optical flow measured in consecutive video frames. We assume that the camera is mounted on a car or a robot which move forward and sideways on a flat area to acquire the images used for the calibration. The vanishing points of the optical flow lines provide enough information to compute the camera rotation matrix. We also show how the flow lines on the ground together with the vehicles's velocity provide enough information to compute the camera position

merging the video with the whiteboard stream for remote lectures

In the system we use for recording and transmitting lectures over the Internet, the board content is transmitted as vector graphics, producing thus a high quality image, while the video of the lecturer is sent as a separate stream. It is easy for the viewer to read the board but the lecturer appears in a separate window. To eliminate this problem, we segment the lecturer from the video stream and paste his image onto the board image at video stream rates. The lecturer can be dimmed from opaque to semitransparent, or even transparent. This paper explains the techniques we apply to achieve this and argue that it can also compete with state of the art image segmentation used for foreground extraction in still images. The approach does not only provide a solution to the divided attention problem which arises when board and lecturer images are transmitted in two different streams, it can also be applied to a variety of other problems where a foreground object must be segmented