2008 Jan 18 - Fri

C++ Tools: Face Detection, Artificial Neural Networks

Today I came across a couple of C++ projects relating to Neural Network usage. One is located at CodeProject called Face Detection C++ Library with Skin and Motion Analysis. The author has used a number of interesting statistical and analytical methods for face detection. To quote his mouth-full: "An understanding of wavelet-analysis, dimensionality reduction methods (PCA, LDA, ICA), artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), SSE programming, image processing, morphological operations (erosion, dilation), histogram equalization, image filtering, C++ programming and some face detection background would be desirable.".

From a C++ library perspective, here is a Fast Artificial Neural Network Library (FANN). I believe the library is written in C, but has API bindings in about 13 different programming language formats, of course with one being C++. The author's description goes as follows: "Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a free open source neural network library, which implements multilayer artificial neural networks in C with support for both fully connected and sparsely connected networks. Cross-platform execution in both fixed and floating point are supported. It includes a framework for easy handling of training data sets. It is easy to use, versatile, well documented, and fast."

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Network Security Tools

ITSecurity has an article titled The 10 Best Free Security Tools. One correction I'd like to make is that Ethereal has been forked with modern version now known as WireShark.

One cool knowledge snippet I learned is that NetStumbler, the rogue Wireless Access Point detecter, now has a sibling for Windows CE based mobile devices.

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They Can't be Better Than Sliced Bread

On dzone, there were a couple of language related articles. Well, ok, the whole site is devoted to programming languages. Perhaps what I was trying to say is that I detected a mild language war brewing. Well, maybe skirmish. Maybe mild skirmish.

Linux.com has an article on D, called New D language pumps up programmer productivity. The writer does a lot of comparing against C++. I still fail to see why D shines though. What makes it special?

C# is supposed to be a better C++. When you couple C# with Microsoft's CLI (Common Language Interface) libraries, it is a nice development environment. C# takes away some nice things from C++, but adds its own nice things.

Java is also supposed to be a better C++. Java does indeed do a good job of of being platform independent. For instance, I liked the way of being able to install Eclipse, the Java based IDE, on a Linux platform or a Windows platform and being up and running in minutes. I havn't programmed in Java, so can't make a fair comparison of what makes Java a nice place in which to program.

In an article by Rick Hightower, he mentions Java, Ruby, Python, and Scala. In the article is a graph showing language usage. Java ranks first and C++ second.

I have an insurance modelling friend who swears by Python, which ranks a low sixth in the chart.

Anyway, what got me started on this all was an article called The Great Language Backlash. I thought, oh cool, someone is going to do an impressive rant on what is missing in all the world's programming languages. it ended up being some little rant about Ruby and Groovy, with Ruby being last in the chart I mentioned above. I'm glad the writer redeemed himself with his final phrase of the article: use the best tool for the job. Well, I suppose that phrase, in and of itself, is worthy of many a rant all by its lonesome.

I just can't resist: C++ rocks!! Maybe the version 0x should be changed to C!!! I'll leave it up to the reader to determine how many '!' belong to the C and how many belong to sentence punctuation.

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