Once in the past, I was wondering how many times I had written null checks in C# so far. It must have been at least ten thousand times. Later, I discovered F#, which avoids null in most cases. Seeing that "in principle, it can be done in .NET languages", I wrote a Visual Studio User Voice suggestion to add compile-time null reference checking to C#. The suggestion quickly rose to the top and stayed there until today. Finally... Six yea[...]

Computer vision should not be confused with image processing (as we all know). I love building computer vision pipelines, but sometimes menial tasks of pure image processing, automated editing come up. Suppose you had the same astronauts from one of the previous posts participating in a study, where they are actually filmed watching something, say […]

Auto-writing Software Good software writes itself. We all know the patterns and following them makes things easy. Not because we have memorized any monumental volume on design patterns, but because years of experience taught us what should be done on an almost intuitive level. Also in a negative sense. We avoid duplication, globals, encapsulation violations. […]

Much of Scala’s power comes from its flexibility and generality as a language. You can mold it quite extensively to suit your particular problem domain or coding style. The downside of this is that Scala can sometimes be permissive and accommodating to a fault. You often hear Haskell or F# users attest to a sense of “if it compiles, it works” – in my experience this is not generally the case with Scala. To illustrate this point, let’s walk through a few examples, all of which are distilled from honest-[...]

The Choices I have experimented with OpenCV and Dlib face detection in my computer vision pipeline. Both work well, but the Dlib one worked better: it is more sensitive with (in my case) almost no false positives right out of the box! Dlib uses several HOG filters that account for profile as well as frontal […]