Get Points of Intersection with Sine Wave - c#

I have a particle at a fixed position X and fixed amplitude AMP that travels on a sin wave.
I'd like to be able to dynamically change the period of the target sine wave WITHOUT moving the particle. (When I change the period, its X position doesn't line up to the same Y position of the graph with a different period, so it jumps all over the place.
I have a solution for this - Find where the graph with the new period intersects with the graph of the old period and create an X-offset, lining these two figures up.
For any given y on a sin wave, there will be 2 corresponding X values per period. I'm trying to get these two values. I'll then compare the derivatives to choose which one I want.
However, I don't know how to get both of these values. Any ideas?
Here's an image of what I'm after: Sin Wave Logic

If you have a sine-wave defined by
y = sin(a*(x+c))+d
then you can reverse it by
x = (arcsin(y-d)-c)/a
for a given a.
This yields the solution in the range of [-pi;pi]
The other solution you are looking for is then 2*pi-x

If you allow a little cheating, you can use a cross-fading effect to get a smooth transition from f(t) to g(t) via
h(s,t)=(1-s)*f(t)+s*g(t)
while s as a function of t is between 0 and 1 and use something like
y = h( (t-ts)/d, t)
for the time period from ts to ts+d.

Related

Make the distance between neighbor music notes the same (Theremin like app)

I'm making a Theremin-like app in Unity (C#).
I have horizontal Axis X, on which I can click (with a mouse or with a finger on a smartphone).
This X-axis determines the frequency, which will be played.
The user will specify the frequency range of the board (X-Axis), let's say from frequency 261.63 (note C4) to 523.25 (note C5).
I'll calculate x_position_ratio which is a number between 0 and 1 determining, where did the user click on the X-axis (0 being on the most left (note C4 in this example), 1 on the most right (note C5))
From this, I will calculate the frequency to play by equation
float freqRange = maxFreq - minFreq;
float frequency = (x_position_ratio * freqRange) + minFreq;
And then play the frequency. It works just fine.
If I draw the notes on the board (X-axis), we can see, that the higher is the frequency, the higher is the jump between the 2 notes.
// Drawing just note A4 to demonstrate the code
float a4 = 440.0f //frequency of note A4
float x_position = (a4 - minFreq) / freqRange;
loc_x_position indicating the position of the note on the X-axis between 0 to 1
output
Question:
I would like to make the jump, same, between 2 notes (Make it linear instead of exponential, if you understand what I mean). Found the equation on Wikipedia Piano_key_frequencies but it's for the keys. I want it to every frequency and I cannot figure out how to implement it in my 2 code examples I posted
I figured it out. Tried to plot it logarithmic to at least approximate the result.
I was inspired by this answer Plotting logarithmic graph
Turns out this solution worked
To draw notes on the x-axis I used this:
minFreq = Mathf.Log10(minFreq);
maxFreq = Mathf.Log10(maxFreq);
float freqRange = maxFreq - minFreq;
x_position = (Mathf.Log10(frequencyOfNoteToPlot) - minFreq) / freqRange;
and to calculate the frequency I just derived frequency from the equation for the x_position and ended up with this piece of code:
frequency = Mathf.Pow(10, x_position * freqRange + minFreq);
One thing I still don't get is, why it doesn't matter, which base of the logarithm I use. Is it because I'm always getting ratio (value between 0 to 1)?

Comparing two Int variables with room/margin for error

public void checkForCollision () {
int headX = cells[0].x;
int headY = cells[0].y;
int noOfParts = nPoints;
for(int i = 1; i <noOfParts;i++)
{
int tempX = cells[i].x;
int tempY = cells[i].y;
if(tempX == headX && tempY == headY){
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,"Head hit body");
//EndGameCollectScore etc.
}
}
}
EDIT: 'Cells[]' is an array of type Point AND noOfParts is just how many segments the snake has
main Question
With the above code I'm trying to compare tempX to headX but i would like to have a sort of margin for error e.g. +-5 but am unsure how to accomplish this, my reasoning behind this is i'm thinking maybe the x and Y variables might be a few digits apart so if i have the radius of one of the segment of the snake (explanation of 'snake' in Alternate below) then if i'm right and the values are a tiny bit off it should still come back positive.
OR
Alternative
if anyone can suggest a better way for doing this? Basically it's for a Snake game and headX and headY is the head of the snake and the remaining X and Y variables in Cells is the body, and I'm attempting to compare if the head hits the body.
I tested it and it seemed to work but after i tested it again it seems it will only pick up the collision if i make the snake double back on itself for a few squares. e.g. IF i cross the body perpendicular it will not detect the collision.
Also i am fairly certain that this method is called after each block the snake moves.
Cheers,
Shane.
P.S Running of very little sleep and way too much sugar in my blood, If you need further clarification because the above doesn't make alot of sense let me know.
int eps = 5;
if (Math.abs(tempX - headX) <= eps && Math.abs(tempY - headY) <= eps) {
// ...
}
To check if two points are within a delta from each other, compute the distance between them. You can avoid going into the square root territory by using squares, like this:
int distSq = (tempX-headX)*(tempX-headX) + (tempY-headY)*(tempY-headY);
int minDist = 5;
if (distSq < minDist*minDist) {
// too close
}
I don't know how your snake looks, but if it has a complex shape, looking for a hit can be expensive in terms of speed. You can speed up collision detection if you can do a quick test, to see if a collision is possible at all. You can do this by using a bounding box. You would have to keep track of minimum and maximum x and y positions of the snake body. Only if a coordinate lies within these boundaries you would take account of the exact shape of the snake. How this has to be done depends on how the snake is represented. Check for each tile or each pixel the snake is made of or possibly check if the coordinate is within a polygon, if the snake outline is defined by a polygon. (I'm not going to explain how this works here, but you will find algorithms if you google a bit.)
If you need to calculate the distance to another point (the snake head), you can use different metrics for this. If only horizontal and vertical movements are possible within the game, the so called Manhattan or taxi distance can be used: d = |x1-x0| + |y1-y0|. It consists of adding the x and y distances, or you can use the maximum of both distances: d = Max(|x1-x0|, |y1-y0|) (correponds to 2kay's approach).
If you need the exact distance, apply the Pythagorean formula. In order to compare the distance with the error margin, you don't need to calculate the square root. Instead compare the square of the distance with the square of the error margin. This saves time. (x1-x0)^2 + (y1-y0)^2 < error_margin^2.

Finding angle between two markers for use in mathematical optimisation

I am trying to minimize the difference between sets of square markers in 3d space with a set of unknown parameters.
I have a model set of these square markers (represented by 3d position and rotation) which should at the end of optimization match up with a set of observed square markers.
I am using Levenberg–Marquardt to optimize the set of unknown parameters, these parameters will alter the position and rotation of the model 3d markers until they match (more or less) with the observed 3d marker positions.
The observed 3d markers come from a computer vision marker detection algorithm. It gives the id of the markers seen in each frame and the transformation from the camera of each marker (using Coplanar posit). Each 'frame' would only be able to see a small number of markers in the total set of markers, there will also be inaccuracies in the transformation.
I have thought of how to construct my minimization function and I thought to try to compare the relative rotations and minimize the difference between the rotations in each iteration of the LM optimisation.
Essentially:
foreach (Marker m1 in markers)
{
foreach (Marker m2 in markers)
{
Vector3 eulerRotation = getRotation(m1, m2);
ObservedMarker observed1 = getMatchingObserved(m1);
ObservedMarker observed2 = getMatchingObserved(m2);
Vector3 eulerRotationObserved = getRotation(observed1, observed2);
double diffX = Math.Abs(eulerRotation.X - eulerRotationObserved.X);
double diffY = Math.Abs(eulerRotation.Y - eulerRotationObserved.Y);
double diffZ = Math.Abs(eulerRotation.Z - eulerRotationObserved.Z);
}
}
Where diffX, diffY and diffZ are the values to be minimized.
I am using the following to calculate the angles:
Vector3 axis = Vector3.Cross(getNormal(m1), getNormal(m2));
axis.Normalize();
double angle = Math.Acos(Vector3.Dot(getNormal(m1), getNormal(m2)));
Vector3 modelRotation = calculateEulerAngle(axis, angle);
getNormal(Marker m) calculates the normal to the plane that the square marker lies on.
I am sure I am doing something wrong here though. Throwing this all into the LM optimiser (I am using ALGLib) doesn't seem to do anything, it goes through 1 iteration and finishes without changing any of the unknown parameters (initially all 0).
I am thinking that something is wrong with the function I am trying to minimize over. It seems sometimes the angle calculated (3rd line) returns NaN (I am currently setting this case to return diffX, diffY, diffZ as 0). Is it even valid to compare the euler angles as above?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Further information:
Program is written in C#, I am using XNA as well.
The model markers are represented by its four corners in 3D coords
All the model markers are in the same coordinate space.
Observed markers are the four corners as translations from the camera position in camera coordinate space
If m1 and m2 markers are the same marker id or if either m1 or m2 is not observed, I set all the diffs to 0 (no difference).
At first I thought this might be a typo, but then I realized that this could be a bug, having been a victim of similar cases myself in the past.
Shouldn't diffY and diffZ be:
double diffY = Math.Abs(eulerRotation.Y - eulerRotationObserved.Y);
double diffZ = Math.Abs(eulerRotation.Z - eulerRotationObserved.Z);
I don't have enough reputation to post this as a comment, hence posting it as an answer!
Any luck with this? Is it correct to assume that you want to minimize the "sum" of all diffs over all marker combinations? I think if you want to use LM you should not use Math.Abs.
One alternative would be to formulate your objective function manually and use another optimizer. I have recently ported two non-linear optimizers to C# which do not even require you to compute derivatives:
COBYLA2, supports non-linear constraints but require more iterations.
BOBYQA, limited to variable bounds constraints, but provides a considerable more efficient iteration scheme.

XNA - 3D Rotation about local (changing) ship axes - What am I missing?

I'm developing a 3D spaceshooter in XNA as a school project (basically Asteroids in 3D with power-ups), and have been working to implement roll, pitch, and yaw with respect to the ship's local axes. (I should emphasize: the rotation is not with respect to the absolute/world x, y, and z axes.) Sadly, I've been struggling with this for the last few weeks. Google and my neolithic monkey brain have failed me; maybe you folks can help!
Here's my setup:
Via keyboard input, I have the following variables ready to go:
yawRadians, which stores the desired yaw away from the ship's initial
position
pitchRadians, which stores the desired pitch away from the
ship's initial position
rollRadians, which stores the desired roll
away from the ship's initial position
The ship also maintains its own Front, Back, Right, Left, Top and Bottom unit vectors, which are used both for the rotations and also for propulsion. (Different keys will propel the ship toward the Front, Back, etc. This part is working great.)
Ultimately, I generate the rotation matrix mShipRotation, representing all of the ship's rotations, which is passed to the ship's draw method.
The problem I have is with the rotations themselves. Different solutions I've tried have had differing results. Here's what I've gone with so far:
Method 1 – Yaw, Pitch, and Roll relative to the absolute/world x, y, and z axes
At first, I naively tried using the following in my ship's Update method:
qYawPitchRoll = Quaternion.CreateFromYawPitchRoll(yawRadians, pitchRadians, rollRadians);
vFront = Vector3.Transform(vOriginalFront, qYawPitchRoll);
vBack = -1 * vFront;
vRight = Vector3.Transform(vOriginalRight, qYawPitchRoll);
vLeft = -1 * vRight;
vTop = Vector3.Transform(vOriginalTop, qYawPitchRoll);
vBottom = -1 * vTop;
mShipRotation = Matrix.CreateFromQuaternion(qYawPitchRoll);
(vOriginalFront, vOriginalRight, and vOriginalTop just store the ship's initial orientation.)
The above actually works without any errors, except that the rotations are always with respect to the x, y, and z axes, and not with respect to the ship's Front/Back/Right/Left/Top/Bottom vectors. This results in the ship not always yawing and pitching as expected. (Specifically, yawing degenerates to rolling if you have pitched up so the ship is pointing to the top. This makes sense, as yawing in this solution is just rotating about the world up axis.)
I heard about the Quarternion.CreateFromAxisAngle method, which sounded perfect. I could just combine three Quaternion rotations, one around each of the ship's local axis. What could go wrong?
Method 2 – Quaternion.CreateFromAxisAngle
Here's the second code snippet I used in my ship's Update method:
qPitch = Quaternion.CreateFromAxisAngle(vRight, pitchRadians);
qYaw = Quaternion.CreateFromAxisAngle(vTop, yawRadians);
qRoll = Quaternion.CreateFromAxisAngle(vFront, rollRadians);
qPitchYawAndRoll = Quaternion.Concatenate(Quaternion.Concatenate(qPitch, qYaw), qRoll);
vFront = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalFront, qPitchYawAndRoll));
vBack = -1 * vFront;
vRight = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalRight, qPitchYawAndRoll));
vLeft = -1 * vRight;
vTop = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalTop, qPitchYawAndRoll));
vBottom = -1 * vTop;
mShipRotation = Matrix.CreateFromQuaternion(qPitchYawAndRoll);
The above works perfectly if I only do one rotation at a time (yaw, pitch, or roll), but if I combine more than one rotation simultaneously, the ship begins to wildly spin and point in many different directions, getting more and more warped until it disappears entirely.
I've tried variants of the above where I first apply the Pitch to all the vectors, then the Yaw, then the Roll, but no luck.
I also tried it using Matrices directly, despite concerns of Gimbal Lock:
Method 3: Matrices
mShipRotation = Matrix.Identity;
mShipRotation *= Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(vRight, pitchRadians);
mShipRotation *= Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(vFront, rollRadians);
mShipRotation *= Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(vTop, yawRadians);
vFront = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalFront, mShipRotation));
vBack = -1 * vFront;
vRight = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalRight, mShipRotation));
vLeft = -1 * vRight;
vTop = Vector3.Normalize(Vector3.Transform(vOriginalTop, mShipRotation));
vBottom = -1 * vTop;
No luck; I got the same behavior. One rotation at a time is okay, but rotating about multiple axes resulted in the same bizarre spinning behavior.
After some brilliant debugging (read as: blindly outputting variables to the console), I noticed that the Front/Right/Top vectors were slowly, over time, becoming less orthogonal to one another. I added Normalization to vectors basically every step of the way, and also tried computing new vectors based on cross products, to try to ensure that they always remained perpendicular to one another, but even then they were not perfectly orthogonal. I'm guessing this is due to floating point math not being perfectly precise.
Note that I regenerate the mShipRotation matrix every Update method, so it cannot be accumulating drift or inaccuracies directly. I think that applying multiple Quarternion rotations may be accumulating error (as I can do one rotation just fine), but my attempts to fix it have not worked.
In short:
I can pitch/roll/yaw relative to the world axes x, y, and z just
fine. It's just not what the player would expect to happen as the
rolling/pitching/yawing is not relative to the ship, but to the
world.
I can roll, pitch, or yaw around the ship's local axes (Front/Back/Top/Bottom/Left/Right) just fine, but only one at a time. Any combination of them will cause the ship to spiral and deform rapidly.
I've tried Quaternions and Matrices. I've tried suggestions I've found in various forums, but ultimately do not wind up with a working solution. Often people recommend using Quaternion.CreateFromYawPitchRoll, not really realizing that the intent is to have a ship rotate about its own (constantly changing) axes, and not the (fixed) world axes.
Any ideas? Given a situation where you are given the roll, pitch, and yaw about a ship's front, right, and top vectors, how would you go about creating the rotation matrix?
You seem to be applying your overall angles (yawRadians, pitchRadians, rollRadians) to your local axis in your methods 2 & 3. These values are married to the world axis and have no meaning in local space. The root of your problem is wanting to hang onto the 3 angles.
In local space, use an angular amount that is the amount you want to rotate between frames. If you only pitched up 0.002f radians since the last frame, that would be what you would use when you rotate around the vRight axis.
This will screw with your overall angle values (yawRadians, pitchRadians, & rollRadians) and render them useless but most folks who stick with 3d programming quickly drop the angle approach to storing the orientation anyway.
Simply rotate your matrix or quaternion little by little each frame around your local axis and store the orientation in that structure (the quat or matrix) instead of the 3 angles.
There is no worries about gimbal lock when you are rotating a matrix about local axis like this. You would have to have 90 degree rotations between frames to bring that into the picture.
If you want to avoid error accumulation use a quat to store the orientation and normalize it each frame. Then the matrix you send to the effect will be made each frame from the quat and will be ortho-normal. Even if you didn't use a quat and stored your orientation in a matrix it would take hours or days to accumulate enough error to be visually noticeable.
This blog might help: http://stevehazen.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/matrix-basics-how-to-step-away-from-storing-an-orientation-as-3-angles/
I think this might be what you're looking for:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/33807.aspx
I'm pretty sure that CreateFromAxisAngle is the way to go.

Gradual cursor move algorithm - Kinect SDK

I am building a Kinect SDK WPF Applicaiton and using the Kinect to move a "cursor"/hand object.
The problem i am having is that at 30 frames a second the cursor is actually jumping around a bit erratically because of the precision of the Kinect (i.e. while holding your hand still the object moves within a 5px space).
I am planning on writing an algorithm that doesn't simply move the X/Y of my "cursor" sprint to the right position on the screen, but behaves more like a "move the hand towards this X/Y co-ordinate" so that it is a more smooth movement.
Can someone point me to a good one that someone else has written so i can avoid reinventing the wheel.
I understand that this is probably pretty common, but as i am more of a business developer i am not sure of the name for such a feature so apologies in advance if its a n00b question.
When I worked with the Kinect, I just used some simple math (which I think is called linear regression) to move to a point some distance between the cursor's current location and its target location. Get the location of the cursor, get the location the user's hand is at (translated to screen coordinates), then move the cursor to some point between those.
float currentX = ..., currentY = ..., targetX = ..., targetY = ...;
float diffX = targetX - currentX;
float diffY = targetY - currentY;
float delta = 0.5f; // 0 = no movement, 1 = move directly to target point.
currentX = currentX + delta * diffX;
currentY = currentY + delta * diffY;
You'll still get jittering, depending on the delta, but it will be much smoother and generally in a smaller area.
On a related note, have you taken a look at the Kinect's skeleton smoothing parameters? You can actually let the SDK handle some of the filtering.
Consider your input values (those jumping positions) as a signal with both low and high frequency parts. The low frequencies represent the rough position/movement while the high frequency parts contain the fast jumping within smaller distances.
So what you need or look for is a low pass filter. That filters out the high frequency parts and leaves the rough (but as accurate as the Kinect can get) position over, if you manage to set it up with the right parameter. This parameter is the crossover frequency for the filter. You have to play around a bit and you will see.
An implementation example for time-discrete values would be from here (originally from wikipedia):
static final float ALPHA = 0.15f;
protected float[] lowPass( float[] input, float[] output ) {
if ( output == null ) return input;
for ( int i=0; i<input.length; i++ ) {
output[i] = output[i] + ALPHA * (input[i] - output[i]);
}
return output;
}
You can put the last values of both the X and Y components of your position vectors into this function to smooth them out (input[0] for X and input[1] for Y, output[0] and output[1] are results of the previous function call).
Like I already said, you have to find a good balance for the smoothing factor ALPHA (0 ≤ ALPHA ≤ 1):
Too big and the signal will not get smoothed enough, the effect wont be sufficient
Too small and the signal will be smoothed 'too much', the cursor will lag behind the users movement, too much inertia
(If you look at the formula newout = out + alpha * (in - out), you see that with a alpha value of 0, you just take the old out value again, therefore the value will never change; while with a value of 1 you have newout = out + in - out that means you dont smooth anything but always take the newest value)
One very simple idea for solving this problem would be to display the cursor at a location that's the average of some past number of positions. For example, suppose that you track the last five locations of the hand and then display the cursor at that position. Then if the user's hand is relatively still, the jerkiness from frame to frame should be reasonably low, because the last five frames will have had the hand in roughly the same position and the noise should cancel out. If the user then moves the cursor across the screen, the cursor will animate as it moves from its old position to the new position, since as you factor in the last five positions of the hand the average position will slowly interpolate between its old and new positions.
This approach is very easily tweaked. You could transform the data points so that old points are weighted more or less than new points, and could adjust the length of the history you keep.
Hope this helps!

Categories

Resources