I have downloaded a matlab code for dithering the images but I don't have the Image Processing toolbox and I don't want to buy it for running this code. Is there any way for running the script?
Many thanks in advance
You can try Octave, or Scilab, or OpenCV, or there are many other open source, and free, alternatives.
But while you're investigating and trying those out, just make sure to measure how much time you're spending on it. If your script uses more than 20 functions from Image processing Toolbox (as you indicated in a comment) then it may be a lot of effort, and depending on how much your time is worth per hour, you may well find it would be better to just buy the toolbox. That's of course just my advice - your choice.
If you're at a university, you will likely be able to get a cheaper educational pricing, or be able to buy the Student edition of MATLAB that includes Image Processing Toolbox. It's also possible to purchase a time-limited license of MATLAB (six months or a year) for a discount, although that pricing is very unadvertised by MathWorks, and you would need to call and speak to a MathWorks account manager to request it.
You can download Scilab , it is a similar platform like Matlab, but it is open source,You dont have to spend your money, You can run matlab code using scilab.
Related
I have recently found a Matlab program (TraitLab) that I would like to try and use, but I do not have a Matlab license. Given that I thought GNU Octave and Matlab are mostly compatible, I tried to run it in octave, but the GUI way to run the program depends on loading a .fig file (now I know that I can use load to get the struct content of that file, but that does not make it a figure I can pass around to various GUI functions), and the headless way to run it reports many parse errors about
nested functions not implemented in this context
Is there an obvious way to get a function written for Matlab that shows these two symptoms to run under Octave?
I have downloaded TraitLab and it is obvious to me that it is a program that will need heavy modification for you to run on octave, which you probably don't have time (or possibly expert knowledge) to implement.
In this case you really only have two other options.
1) Write to the developers and ask them if they could re-implement their code in such a way to make it Octave compatible. I wouldn't hold my breath since it's an academic library, but it's always worth pointing out that there is demand for Octave compatible code. Also given this is old code, it's still worth contacting the stats lab in oxford, since they may have moved to a different codebase that might also suit your needs (e.g. I know that a lot of stats people in oxford have made the switch to julia).
2) In the meantime, if you really want to run this but you don't have matlab, find a matlab installation (e.g. from a friend, or at your university) and create a standalone-version using Matlab's "Application Compiler".
OR
Consider buying matlab. It has a reputation for being prohibitively expensive, partly because University-wide licences do cost an arm and a leg. But for personal use (especially if you are a student?), with the right licence and only the necessary toolkits, it's actually not as prohibitively expensive as you might think.
Are there any tools or algorithm in Matlab or OpenCv, which will take multiple images of any object as input (from different location around the object) and produce the 3D coordinate of the object in the world.
Like Naveh said, in OpenCV the building blocks are there, but putting it together is something you would have to do.
That being said, people have generated a number of SfM tools in both C++ and Matlab. Depending on your goals there are a number of prepackaged things you can look at:
-There is a SfM Matlab Toolbox here, I have not personally used it but I've seen it a number of times.
-If you are just looking for a black-box solution, check out Visual SfM, it is a GUI-fied version of a common SfM workflow.
-A while ago I put together a guide for installing the Visual SfM components individually on Fedora, if you wanted to dig into them. I'm not sure how relevant it is now but it might help.
Regardless, you should certainly educate yourself on the processes involved in creating 3D structure from imagery. It is a complicated process with many details which need to be understood.
What you are asking for is a fully fledged structure from motion algorithm. I don't think such a thing exists in MATLAB or OpenCV right off the shelf. However, the building blocks required for such an algorithm are there.
I suggest you do some background reading to better understand what specific algorithm will suit your needs. A good place to start is in Richard Szeliski's textbook, chapter 7. A free draft is available here. This book is recommended both in general as a good computer vision textbook, and specifically as well for your question, in which Szeliski himself is quite an expert.
i'm a computer systems engineering undergraduate student, i just want to know what advantages MATLAB has over SCILAB and vice versa other than that SCILAB is freeware.
i mean from a computer engineer point of view.
thanks
I can't get into the nitty-gritty details, as I haven't used SCILAB extensively.
But from a bird's eye view, MATLAB is a very polished software, with decades of development behind it. And a price to match. It has a huge array of specialized packages, good support, a reasonably well designed UI, and it's generally user-friendly enough for non-computer engineers to work with. It's also very common in the industry, so it's not a bad thing to have on your resume.
But if you don't have very complex needs (which I suspect, given the use I made of MATLAB during my undergrad years) and you don't need the robustness and polish of a professional package, SCILAB will probably meet your needs.
And since it's based on the MATLAB language, what you'll learn can be transferred later on if your needs change, or you find yourself working in an environment where MATLAB is the default.
Scilab is to MATLAB as OpenOffice is to MS Office. That is to say, it's a not-quite-a-clone, and it's not as polished. You do get most of the functionality of MATLAB, and the price is much more agreeable.
That said, if you want a free/open pretend MATLAB, I personally prefer Octave, since the syntax is closer to MATLAB's.
If you aren't bothered about MATLAB compatibility, then check out the statistics language/environment R, which is delightful.
Matlab is the de-facto industrial standard, is ready now and here, and has a big firm behind to push it.
Scilab has been for long time the open source alternative, but honestly it never appealed me. I think that or they never belived enough on the project, or that you need too much money to make a valid product of this kind.
And it is a real pity, since we desperately need a good open source alternative, because being open source is the only way to be very efficient on different platform: actually matlab is very good at prototyping small-medium programs, but since it is closed source, it's very difficult to scale it up, to supercomputers for example, requiring often a complete rewrite of the code.
Sage might be the third way, it has a lot of potential, and I would bet on it. Check it. It doesn't reinvent the wheel like Scilab did, but take existing software and merge it in a new program. It is based on python which gained a lot of momentum in the computing world, since it has shown to be both easy enough to quick prototype, and versatile enough to run on exotic platforma like supercomputers or GPGPU.
# MatlabDoug
It is feasible in small-medium environment, but on very big task the flexibility of open source is invaluable.
Starting from low-level tool like open-mpi that allows you to finely tune your applications, through higher-level framework like PETSc that lift a lot of work from your shoulders, to java and python implementations that let you concentrate on the algorithms forgetting about many of the headaches of the lower level languages.
But the real proof is that an astonishing majority of the top500 supercompunters prefers open source alternatives.
I have been trying to make work EZSIM with no luck, which is a software to build discrete event simulators in a graphical DOS environment. In this software, my simulator and many others (of the other people in the course I'm taking) don't work, but teacher's simulator (and examples of the downloaded files) does work.
So, I began to distrust of the software.
Do you know any software that resolves the same kind of problems but really works? It will be good if it is free, or I can download an evaluation copy or something like that.
If you don't know any software, do you know any library which might work? Preferably in C#, Ansi C, Java or Delphi.
This may be more than what you're looking for, but check out NS2. It's the standard for open source network simulations, and will allow you to simulate all kinds of network layer behavior.
I've also used JUNG in the past. It's very flexible, although it also doesn't offer much out of the box.
I used Möbius in my computer systems analysis class. It is free for educational use (which sounds like what you're doing). It's a Java GUI which generates C++ code.
The R package queuecomputer. queuecomputer is a computationally efficient method for simulating queues with arbitrary arrival and service times. There is a submitted paper on arXiv describing the algorithm used in the package. Examples can be found within the arXiv paper and the vignette. A web app based on the package is available at https://ace-ebert.shinyapps.io/queue_simulator_mmk/ .
I would like to make a list of remarkable robot simulation environments including advantages and disadvantages of them. Some examples I know of are Webots and Player/Stage.
ROS will visualize your robot and any data you've recorded from it.
Packages to check out would rviz and nav_view
This made me remember the breve project.
breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of multi-agent systems and artificial life.
There is also a wikipage listing Robotics simulators
Microsoft Robotics Studio/Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008
Also read this article on MSDN Magazine
It all depends on what you want to do with the simulation.
I do legged robot simulation, I am coming from a perspective that is different than mobile robotics, but...
If you are interested in dynamics, then the one of the oldest but most difficult to use is sd/fast. The company that originally made it was acquired by a large cad outfit.
You might try heading to : http://www.sdfast.com/
It will cost you a bit of money, but I trust the accuracy of the simulation. There is no contact or collision model, so you have to roll you own. I have used it to simulate bipeds, swimming fish, etc.. There is also no visualization. So, it is for the hardcore programmer. However, it is well respected among us old folk.
OpenDynamics engine is used by people http://www.ode.org/ for "easier" simulation. It comes with an integrator and a primitive visualization package. There are python binding (Hurray for python!).
The build in friction model.. is ... well not very well documented. And did not make sense. Also, the simulations can suddenly "fly apart" for no apparent reason. The simulations may or may not be accurate.
Now, MapleSoft (in beautiful Waterloo Canada) has come out with maplesim. It will set you back a bit of money but here is what I like about it:
It goes beyond just robotics. You can virtually anything. I am sure you can simulate the suspension system on a car, gears, engines... I think it even interfaces with electrical circuit simulation. So, if you are building a high performance product, than MapleSim is a strong contender. Goto www.maplesoft.com and search for it.
They are pretty nice about giving you an eval copy for 30 days.
Of course, you can go home brew. You can solve the Lagrange-Euler equations of motion for most simple robots using a symbolic computation program like maple or mathematica.
EDIT: Have not be able to elegantly do certain derivatives in Maple. I have to resort to a hack.
However, be aware of speed issue.
Finally for more biologically motivated work, you might want to look at opensim (not to be confused with OpenSimulator).
EDIT: OpenSim shares a team member with SD/Fast.
There a lots of other specialized simulators. But, beware.
In sum here are the evaluation criteria for a simulator for robot oriented work:
(1) What kind of collision model do you have ? If it is a very stiff elastic collision, you may have problem in numerical stability during collisions
(2) Visualization- Can you add different terrains, etc..
(3) Handy graphical building tools so you don't have to code then see-what-you-get.
Handling complex system (say a full scale humanoid) is hard to think about in your head.
(4) What is the complexity of the underlying simulation algorithm. If it is O(N) then that is great. But it could be O(N^4) as would be the case for a straight Lagrange-Euler derivation... then your system just will not scale no matter how fast your machine.
(5) How accurate is it and do you care?
(6) Does it help you integrate sensors. For mobile robots you need to have a "robot-eyes view"
(7) If it does visualization, can it you do things like automatically follow the object as it is moving or do you have to chase it around?
Hope that helps!
It's not as impressive looking as Webots, but RobotBasic is free, easy to learn, and useful for prototyping simple robot movement algorithms. You can also program a BasicStamp from the IDE.
I've been programming against SimSpark. It's the open-source simulation engine behind the RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League.
It's extensible for different simulations. You can plug in your own sensors, actuators and models using C++, Ruby and/or RSG (Ruby Scene Graph) files.
ABB has a quite a solution called RobotStudio for simulating their huge industrial robots. I don't think it's free and I don't guess you'll get much fun out of it but it's quite impressive. Here's a page about it
I have been working with Carmen http://carmen.sourceforge.net/ and find it useful.
One of the disadvantages with Carmen is the documentation with all respect I think the webpage is a bit outdated and insufficient. So I like to hear from other people with experience in working with Carmen, or student reports/projects dealing with Carmen.
You can find a great list with simulation environments http://www.intorobotics.com/robotics-simulation-softwares-with-3d-modeling-and-programming-support/
MRDS is one of the best and it's free. Also LabView is good to be used in robotcs
National Instruments' LabView is a graphical programming environment for developing measurement, test, and control systems.
It could be used for 3D control simulation with SolidWorks.
MRDS is free and is one of the best simulation environment for robotics. Workspace also can be used, and please check this link if you want a complete list with robotics simulation software
Trik Studio has a nice and clear 2D model simulator and also visual and textual programming programming environments for them. They also soon will support 3D modeling tools based on Morse simulator. Also it is free and opensource and has multi-language interface.