Mindscape

I am Luka Čehovin, a researcher and a teaching assistant at the Visual Cognitive Systems Laboratory at Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana. This is my personal blog.

[lukacu]

VOT2013 results available

After the success of VOT2013 workshop at ICCV2013 in Sydney, Australia we have also published the detailed results of the competition at the challenge website.

[lukacu]

NX trouble 2

Some time ago I wrote how to fix NX to work with Matlab, but with a recent upgrade of my Linux Mint virtual machine I have noticed that the system started to behave oddly every time the session was restored. While Matlab was still working OK, the elements in other programs started disappearing randomly (mostly text, but images as well sometimes).

I did not manage to find an answer online, however, there were some hints that pointer towards problems with X11 rendering extensions. It turns out that this was actually the cause as an additional NX agent flag -norender (it was a guess actually) reverted everything to normal state. So the AgentExtraOptions line that I mention in the previous post should now look like:

AgentExtraOptions = "-norender -nocomposite -noshpix -noshmem"

The configuration has been tested with Linux Mint 15 using MATE desktop.

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A clean and simple logo that I have created for the "Top dance" dance club.

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A month ago I have made an iteration of the official logo for the ViCoS laboratory. The original idea (that was not mine) had a problem that it was hard to scale to smaller resolutions as well as difficult to print on certain media. The new version is better in this respect. The design migration will be slow though due to the lack of time ... I hope the laboratory websites will be updated till the end of the year.

[lukacu]

Busy at work again, so here is another travel-sketching "blast from the past", this time from my trip to Graz in 2009. I have spent a few days in April there visiting a friend and an ex-co-worker. Sketches of Rathaus, Mariahilfer Kirche, Chinese pavilion, Schlossberg and a fountain in a park.

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Something old again ... in 2001 (or perhaps 2002) I made this sketch of Robba Fountain in Ljubljana.

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Some time ago I found a great online tool for every LaTeX user who has ever tried to guess which command produces the desired mathematical symbol. The service matches handwritten symbols (input using mouse) to a large database of available symbols and returns a list of most similar ones together with their TeX source.

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My current research interest is in visual tracking. Part of this research is dedicated to evaluation methodology, an area that has been for a long time neglected in visual tracking field (which resulted in a Wild-West kind of experiments that supported nothing being published at major computer vision conferences).

This year we are trying to address this issue with a workshop at the ICCV2013 in Sydney, Australia. The workshop is called VOT2013 Visual Object Tracking challenge and is primarily designed as a competition, although we expect to also get additional insights (beyond simple rankings) that would actually benefit the research community.

[lukacu]

Some memories from my trip to the USA in 2009. The Capitol, park in Boston, Fifth avenue and Brooklyn bridge in New York, and Rockport.

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Impressions from my two stays in Birmingham, UK. Victoria Square and St. Martin's Church were created in February and the Malt House from my June visit.

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A blast from the past: Forzanka

Logo color variations for a website dedicated to promote computer science as a study among high-school youngsters. The site is now long dead due to inactivity, but the memory of late-night coding and team-spirit of the founders lives on.

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Fruit power t-shirt concepts

Some time ago I was working on some t-shirt designs that were then never realized. I am therefore just publishing these concepts in my gallery.

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I have created django-publications (it is actually a github fork, but has by now evolved into completely separate direction than the original project) primarily to address our lab's publication repository problem. A production version of the system is available here, and even though the site needs some front-end polish, the system is working well. Anyone interested in setting up a similar service and extending the code is welcome to fork the project on GitHub.

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Since I do not have anything new to post this week, here is an old logo that I made for the CogX EU research project that our lab was a part of. I also did some derivative event logos for three spring schools that were organized within the project.

[lukacu]

Matlab over NX

I have stopped using a powerful desktop computer at work about a year ago and switched to a laptop (an Zenbook actually). With the switch I have also decided to move to remote virtual machine for all processor hungry computations, many of which are done in Matlab.

I connect to the remote machine using NX protocol and from the beginning I have noticed a strange lag only present in Matlab interface. Actually I think it is a Java problem, because Matlab interface is written in Java, but that is not the point. The point is that this was driving me nuts for half a year and then I have finally decided to solve it and I am posting the solution here for everyone to see. After a bit of searching I found this post that describes a correct configuration for official NX client. Unfortunately I do not use a client with all these options present, so I went looking for a server-based solution.

I have found a configuration file for the NX node, called /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg. In the file there is a (commented out) option for extra client options with the key AgentExtraOptions. Uncomment the line and modify it to look like this:

AgentExtraOptions = "-nocomposite -noshpix -noshmem"

This way a new session will be started with disabled shared memory extension and disabled emulation of shared pixmaps, which for some reason cause problems with Java Swing GUI (I have no idea why). After that you have to start a new session to see a difference. Now Matlab should work like a charm. Unfortunately other, native applications on Linux (which I am using on the virtual machine) work less smoothly, but I find it less annoying than previous Matlab unresponsive behavior.

[lukacu]

Logo for European research project PacMan

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TPAMI #1

Earlier this month, almost a year after being accepted, my scientific paper was finally published in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence. In between my current chores, worries about PhD study and life in general I would probably never have noticed it as the entire publishing procedure more or less vanished from my mental focus as soon as I have the proofed the final version. However, I owe it to the young naive me from a few years back, only starting an academic career and dreaming of such a feat ... to look back at the entire process and smile.

:)

It took some time, far too much time in fact, but now the paper is out ... and it is time to move on ... here is to many more!

Official version of the paper. Project webpage.