DARPA to release machine vision software tools as open source

[phantom power]

As the article alludes to, just how "open" this is will depend on what kind of licensing they release under, but anyway releasing the code publicly at all is a very interesting development.

Under a program called Visual Media Reasoning (VMR), DARPA contracted two private companies -- SRI International and Next Century Corporation -- and completed the development of two general-purpose vision system development tools. One offers the automated evaluation of vision algorithm performance over a massive parameter space. The other enables generation of synthetic image content for use in training and testing detection and recognition algorithms.

Mike Geertsen, DARPA program manager, will present an overview of the VMR program and these enabling tools at the Embedded Vision Summit scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 2, in Boston.

The most remarkable thing about the latest development is that "these tools will be released as an adjunct to the OpenCV open-source computer vision software library in late 2013 or early 2014," Jeff Bier, a founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, told us. "You rarely hear 'DARPA' and 'open-source' in the same sentence."

Although there are many shades of open-source, Bier said that DARPA's idea is to make these general-purpose tools publicly available in a source code form.

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=2&doc_id=1319596