May 11, 2018Extract SURF features from transparent imagesWhen working on my beer recognition project BiBirra I’ve encountered problems loading images that had a transparent background. OpenCV by default mess this images up, and this is especially problematic when we extract SURF features from the loaded image. The key idea is to load the image with the flag cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED that tells OpenCV to keep the alpha (transparency) channel. Then we save separately the alpha channel as a binary mask for latter use.Opencv1 min read
Published in Towards Data Science·Mar 15, 2018BiBirra: Beer Label RecognitionA few weeks ago I was in a supermarket with my girlfriend, we were invited to a dinner and we wanted to bring wine. Neither of us is a wine expert but she had a fantastic ace in the hole, she pulled out her phone, took a picture of the…Machine Learning7 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Feb 25, 2018Raschietto: a simple library for web scrapingI often find myself in a situation where I need to get data from a website that has no API or RSS feed. There exists many different web scraping libraries but I’m unsatisfied, I want something capable of: Using CSS selectors. I have worked as a fullstack developer so I…Tech5 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Feb 10, 2018Creating Pointillist Paintings with Python and OpenCVOne of my favorite painting techniques is pointillism, a technique of painting in which small distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. This technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the color spots into a fuller range…Python5 min read
