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Show HN: I made a computer vision addon for Blender

268 points| morroida | 5 years ago |github.com

35 comments

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morroida|5 years ago

So many likes, was not expecting that! I will be presenting this work tomorrow at MICCAI and then I will post my presentation link in the README of the repository!

punnerud|5 years ago

Thank you for your work! Looking forward to the presentation.

I had to look up MICCAI. To others: 23rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING & COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION (4-8 OCTOBER 2020) https://www.miccai2020.org/en

morroida|5 years ago

Guys I won the best paper award!

bluejellybean|5 years ago

Very, very cool work, I fully expect to use this exact project in the future!

To those of you who always thought this stuff looked neat but never tried it out, and to those who may have used blender in the past and gave up, I would HIGHLY encourage you to try again with the latest version of the software. Although there is still a bit of a learning curve, there have been massive improvements have to the software suite.

The ability to code audio/visual in blender is just incredible. I describe it like this: Imagine yourself as someone trying to code an image that looks like a tree in machine code. Then imagine your partner comes over, sees what you are working on, and hands you Python and a fully setup IDE, it's like being given literal magic.

I downloaded the latest version earlier this year to write some basic AI simulations (cube wars!) and to create models for my 3D-printer. Like when I first learned to code, the fun of the machine totally sucked me and I got completely off-task from my original goal. Lately I've been working on two things with the same lines of code, music videos and simulated walks through forests(Think the movie Avatar). With only a few hundred lines of code I am able to generate infinite forest trails in which you can walk (or fly a drone-style camera) through, synced to music that is generated by the AI-mushrooms WITHIN in the scene itself! Literally was able to go from 0 to highly visually engaging trippy music videos in the last year with minimial musical production experience and with no music-video production background. The ease in which you are able to generate things via code is stunning and the limits feel completely boundless.

canada_dry|5 years ago

Similarly, when my niece recently got married I was tasked with putting together the photo/video show for the event.

I chose Blender because it's easy to use and loaded with image and video capability.

Plus, it gave me a good reason to come upto speed on the latest version.

daenz|5 years ago

Very cool! I've done something similar for improving an OCR system on crinkled paper[0]. Blender is a powerful and totally underutilized tool for this kind of work

0. https://www.arwmoffat.com/work/synthetic-training-data

modeless|5 years ago

I've thought about doing this myself! Did it end up improving the OCR system for real world images?

morroida|5 years ago

Uou this is awesome! And it's very nicely presented in the website. I'm wondering how you mapped from the UV to the 3D model. I would like to add that feature to the addon.

technicolorwhat|5 years ago

What the heck. This is beyond awesome I totally want to try it out

chrisseaton|5 years ago

Does using synthetic training data introduce any problems? How do you ensure your synthetic data matches real data?

dr_zoidberg|5 years ago

Ok, this turned out to be far more interesting than the title here reads like. The little abstract at the top is far more informative:

> A Blender user-interface to generate synthetic ground truth data (benchmarks) for Computer Vision applications.

And it lets you make stereo images, depth maps, segmentation masks, surface normals and optical flow data from the rendered animation, and export it all in .npz numpy format. Quite interesting project.

doctoboggan|5 years ago

This is awesome! I’ve been working with blender scripts a lot lately for my side project where I generate jewelry for 3D printing (https://lulimjewelry.com)

It’s an incredibly powerful tool, IMO one of the best large open source applications. I’ve learned some good ideas by reading the plug-in here, thank you!

bluejellybean|5 years ago

Really cool! I just sent you an email (I love your contact info on HN btw!)

m_ke|5 years ago

canada_dry|5 years ago

The difference is that none of the above examples actually process real image input - the Cartucho app utilizes stereo cam images.

santaclaus|5 years ago

Very cool! Just the other day I was trying to set Blender’s camera based on a standard 3x4 computer vision KRT matrix, and it is surprisingly a pain in the ass —- I wish more of these graphics CAD packages (Blender, Houdini, Maya) made it easier to deal with vision data.

morroida|5 years ago

I agree, these tools should have an official computer vision module since so many people are using synthetic data these days.

btparker|5 years ago

Excellent! For a while my job entailed this very thing: creating synthetic data for computer vision, and I used Blender as well! You've done a great job.

blensor|5 years ago

Wouldn't a Show HN post make more sense here? I noticed that they tend to fare better (keep the interest active for longer)

amelius|5 years ago

One question: why does it need to run inside Blender instead of just using its graphical primitives as a library?

morroida|5 years ago

That's a good idea, it would make it faster for sure.

DonCopal|5 years ago

Is this face motion tracking using a camera to apply to 3D models?

tantalor|5 years ago

"synthetic ground truth"... isn't that an oxymoron?

notsuoh|5 years ago

Ground truth in this case means images with labels of some sort on parts of the image or objects in the image, not that they're real images themselves. So a cat in a photo with a label or mask on the cat would be "ground truth" on what part of the image a cat is in, or that there is a cat.

tim44|5 years ago

Nerb here. I can't say what this does but build a frame for ai comparison? Blender doesn't need so much eyes anyways? Buuuuut it doesnt have them either in this way?