Be warned… This Blog entry might contain too much engineer technical stuff. Then again it might not… I will leave the exercise of telling of determining that up to the reader. And I will not be building this Weekend. Between us, Richard and I have too many things on.

Outlook Style Grid

I was been looking for a Grid Control for much of yesterday afternoon. I actually found one at 10 Tec from Eastern Europe. This company should not be confused with Ten-Tec in the USA which sells radio equipment.

I wanted something where I can add data as required, and move columns around with a ‘Field Chooser’, and sort data and group it too. And there is very very little on the market. Most of the products assume that you are going to be connected to a database, and are quite aimed at that market.

I do not want that. I have different needs. I want to display data, and allow different users to see different amounts of information. And to choose columns. I want the user to be able to sort the columns too, move them around, hide them. Add them as required – well, from a well defined list. For the last few weeks I have been fighting with a marketing person who wanted the software more ‘User Friendly’ and I could never understand what his ideas were to improve it… Now I know. Like, I knew I needed to improve the user interface but I just could not see how. Now I do know.

Speed Camera

Sometimes I just like to think about solutions to problems that I have no need to solve. Just like crossword puzzles, but without the constraints. It keeps my mind active. Just academic exercises, to be done in my mind only. This could be anything from how I would go about building more lanes for the M5 East to what the how I would fix the environment of south east Australia if I had unlimited funds.

Why and I talking about this? well, I saw an article online somewhere a few days ago about police somewhere looking at using a video camera to detect speeders. Not speed cameras like we have in Sydney where they put sensors in the road, or like in Victoria where they time your travel between two points, but a single camera. The idea is that the device looks at you driving on a road and works out how far you have traveled in a set period of time.

If you use a video camera recording traffic and play it back you are able to work out how fast the cars are going but it requires work. I was thinking about how this would be done. And I came up with some steps… And please bear in mind that these steps are full of buzzwords that the people who know those words will understand, and other people will probably not understand.

1. Remove any shakes. This technology is commonly in video cameras anyway. I think it uses a cross-correlation function between frames to work out if the image had moved when it should not have. There are probably IC’s to do this job.

2. Find the Differences between two frames. This is called Image Subtraction. With the shakes removed, the images will live up. This will remove the background detail from both images.

3. Apply a software ‘zoom’ function to the image with the car furthest away, and then working out which ‘zoom’ provides a picture closest to the image closest. This would be done with a cross-correlation function with the zoom level being one of the variables. This will return a likely zoom level needed to make the two identical. Have a filter on the Cross-Correlation Function that places more emphasis on the readings in the centre of the screen, and less on the outside.

4. Knowing the lens paramaters, and the zoom level needed, and the time difference between readings you can then determine the speed of the vehicle.