Develop Reference

Localization of a robot using Kinect and EMGU(OpenCV wrapper)

I'm working on small WPF desktop app to track a robot. I have a Kinect for Windows on my desk and I was able to do the basic features and run the Depth camera stream and the RGB camera stream.
What I need is to track a robot on the floor but I have no idea where to start. I found out that I should use EMGU (OpenCV wrapper)
What I want to do is track a robot and find it's location using the depth camera. Basically, it's for localization of the robot using Stereo Triangulation. Then using TCP and Wifi to send the robot some commands to move him from one place to an other using both the RGB and Depth camera. The RGB camera will also be used to map the object in the area so that the robot can take the best path and avoid the objects.
The problem is that I have never worked with Computer Vision before and it's actually my first, I'm not stuck to a deadline and I'm more than willing to learn all the related stuff to finish this project.
I'm looking for details, explanation, hints, links or tutorials to achieve my need.
Thanks.

Robot localization is a very tricky problem and I myself have been struggling for months now, I can tell you what I have achieved But you have a number of options:
Optical Flow Based Odometery: (Also known as visual odometry):
Extract keypoints from one image or features (I used Shi-Tomashi, or cvGoodFeaturesToTrack)
Do the same for a consecutive image
Match these features (I used Lucas-Kanade)
Extract depth information from Kinect
Calculate transformation between two 3D point clouds.
What the above algorithm is doing is it is trying to estimate the camera motion between two frames, which will tell you the position of the robot.
Monte Carlo Localization: This is rather simpler, but you should also use wheel odometery with it.
Check this paper out for a c# based approach.
The method above uses probabalistic models to determine the robot's location.
The sad part is even though libraries exist in C++ to do what you need very easily, wrapping them for C# is a herculean task. If you however can code a wrapper, then 90% of your work is done, the key libraries to use are PCL and MRPT.
The last option (Which by far is the easiest, but the most inaccurate) is to use KinectFusion built in to the Kinect SDK 1.7. But my experiences with it for robot localization have been very bad.
You must read Slam for Dummies, it will make things about Monte Carlo Localization very clear.
The hard reality is, that this is very tricky and you will most probably end up doing it yourself. I hope you dive into this vast topic, and would learn awesome stuff.
For further information, or wrappers that I have written. Just comment below... :-)
Best

Not sure if is would help you or not...but I put together a Python module that might help.
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/38883#comments

Displaying, overlaying and interpreting live video feed in WinForms

I am starting a new project to show live video in a Windows form from an attached web cam and overlay that video with windows controls (buttons etc). Additionally I would like to do some image correction to remove distortion on the fly and do some edge detection.
I'm confused as to which library might be best suited for this.
OpenCVSharp - Can handle the correction / detection, not sure if overlay / live feed is possible.
DirectShow/DirectShow.Net - Do I need to code filters up for the
overlay, how to handle edge detection?
AForge.net - It's been recommended but I'm not sure it is as capable
Does anyone have experience of these or other libs that might be suitable for access from .Net?

If you only want to work with the vision part then AForge.net is your best bet. I have used it in the past and it was pretty good for video/feed stuff. Don't expect to do something with your audio later on though since AForge.NET only supports Vision related stuff. Personally I wouldn't use DirectShow since that is pretty old and sometimes requires you to do some complex interop tricks to get what you want. If you want to go the DirectShow way at least use DirectShow.NET.

I believe you can accomplish that with OpenCVSharp and the instructions from transparent image overlay.

Draw a human 3d body, Silverlight or Adobe Flash

Which technology to choose, that gives me the possibility to draw a 3d human in browser, with tricks like move the body with mouse, with less cpu use.
Thank in advance.

Silverlight 4 is not as competent in 3d rendering as Flash is.
Having said that, Silverlight 5 will have greater support for 3d thanks to its XNA integration
EDIT: It seems I was rather fast to judge - the official 3d support fo flash (aka molehill) is still under incubation, but flash still has some impressive community-based libraries for 3d still making it (IMO) the more mature solution (Add to that it's larger cross-platform and user support).

This depends on what is a target market of your program.
Silverlight: is C#, 3D modelling is possible, there is even port of Silverlight of Mono MoonLight, but basically yuo should consider that your clients in this case will be Windows OS owners, and considering a OSes destribution information from Os destribution worldwide, you're on winner train.
So looking on your tags: C#, I would say go for Silverlight.
There is another really good product for 3D in browsing, like WebGL, but it's currently not supported of IE, for security concerns, which doesn't mean that will not be supported in future, but.. you know, for now it's not. Here is explanation: Microsoft not going to support WebGL. If you are ready to say "no" to IE (at least for now), it's a good choice.
So for now, I personally, would suggest to use Silverlight 3D. Just google "Silbverlight 3D samples" and you will be given plenty of samples available on inetrnet.
EDIT
Good comparing article on CodeProject
Hope this helps.
Regards.

Flash doesn't really have 3D graphics support, although there are a couple of libraries available. Silverlight also doesn't do 3D. So, really, the answer is "none of the above work all that well."
If you're willing to force your clients to use a current browser, you can use HTML5 and WebGL to render 3D objects without too much trouble.

How to draw an unfilled square on top of a stream video using a mouse and track the object enclosed in the square automatically in C#?

I am making an object tracking application. I have used Emgucv 2.1.0.0
to load a video file
to a picturebox. I have also taken the video stream from a web camera.
Now, I want
to draw an unfilled square on the video stream using a mouse and then track the object enclosed
by the unfilled square as the video continues to stream.
This is what people have suggested so far:-
(1) .NET Video overlay drawing(DirectX) - but this is for C++ users, the suggester
said that there are .NET wrappers, but I had a hard time finding any.
(2) DxLogo sample
DxLogo – A sample application showing how to superimpose a logo on a data stream.
It uses a capture device for the video source, and outputs the result to a file.
Sadly, this does not use a mouse.
(3) GDI+ and mouse handling - this area I do not have a clue.
And for tracking the object in the square, I would appreciate if someone give me some research paper links to read.
Any help as to using the mouse to draw on a video is greatly appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Many Thanks

It sounds like you want to do image detection and / or tracking.
The EmguCV ( http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ) library provides a good foundation for this sort of thing in .Net.
e.g. http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Tutorial#Examples
It's a pretty meaty subject with quite a few years and different branches of research associated with it so I'm not sure anyone can give the definitive guide to such things but reading up neural networks and related topics would give you a pretty good grounding in the way EmguCV and related libraries manage it.
It should be noted that systems such as EmguCV are designed to recognise predefined items within a scene (such as a licence plate number) rather than an arbitory feature within a scene.
For arbitory tracking of a given feature, a search for research papers on edge detection and the like (in combination with a library such a EmguCV) is probably a good start.
(You also may want to sneak a peek at an existing application such as http://www.pfhoe.com/ to see if it fits your needs)

Where can I find, or how can I build, a cartoonizer for C#?

I am working on the development of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in .NET using C# and Silverlight. One of the features that has been requested for this game is to allow players to upload their own avatars.
Rather than displaying the uploaded images in their raw forms, we want to convert the images to a cartoon form--in other words to cartoonize the image.
Several sites which can accomplish such a task are listed at http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/11-sites-to-create-cartoon-characters-of-yourself/
I realize that these sites are applying an image filter to create the cartoon image. Frankly, I have no reasonable idea what these cartoon image filter algorithms might look like or if there is anything already available in C# or .NET that I could use. If there are no libraries available, I am curious how difficult it would be to roll my own.
This is a minor game feature so I am not interested in devoting a week or more of coding time to implement this. However, if I can code up what I need within a day, then it is probably viable.
At this point, I am primarily looking for guidance as to
what is possible
what libraries are already available (preferably as open source)
where i may find additional information
any other advice or guidance you may be able to provide
Thank you in advance!

Apparently you apply a Gaussian Blur filter to the image. Then you sharpen the image. Perhaps the AForge libraries would help you out.

I've used code from the image processing lab on code project before with success. (update: here's the library it uses)
Christian Graus also has written a whole series on GDI image processing which I found useful (and has the effects listed above for filtering capabilities).