New Image Swirl Launched!

Link: http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/html/zoom.html?q=eiffel%20tower

This summer, teamed up with two other Google interns Xin Yan and David Vetrano, I took 20% time and created a new image image swirl exploration tool. Inspired by Google maps' intuitive and smooth UI, we aimed to build a similar UI to explore large sets of images. We organize the image so that similar images are located closer on the 'image map'.

Here is what we have done:
1. Get images that returned by image search for a query word.
2. Build a large 'image map', so that similar images are located closer to each other.
3. Design a UI: 'Pan' to show different parts of the map and 'zoom' to show different granularity of similarity.

Since similar images are located tightly, we think this would work great on small display devices. We further speculate that pinch-to-zoom is a perfect match to this UI.

Check it out and let me know what do you think!

My very first paper!

This is my first peer reviewed paper in CVPR 2011.
"Image Saliency: From Local to Global Context" (PDF)

Realtime video streaming

This is my fun project. This prototype can stream whatever on one computer screen to another computer given its IP address.

On the server side, the video is encoded in H264 format and transmitted to the client through network. Client decodes the video and display.

My goal is reduce the latency as much as I can. Currently the latency is not bad at 512x512 with normal among of motion with 30fps. See video here:

Please stay tuned.
Update: I added remote control function that transmit the mouse and keyboard events, like click and key press back to the streaming end. So the a person on the receiving end can enjoy full functionality of any software that installed on the streaming end.
See video here: