This week’s photographic obsession is Dominik Seibold’s Hough Transform Camera, which I can explain in two different ways: the simple way, and the science way.
First, the simple way: you point your camera at stuff and the Hough Transform Camera converts it into weird wavy lines. You can change the colors of the weird wavy lines if you like. And save the resulting images to your iPhone’s Camera Roll. That’s pretty much it. But it’s fun to experiment with.
Second, the science way. Now you’ll have to forgive me if I get muddled up here. I was a humanities student and sciencey stuff has never been my strong point. So befuddled was I, that I contacted Dominik Seibold and asked him how it works.
It turns out that there’s a mathematical thing called a Hough transform, named after Peter Hough, who patented the idea in 1962. There’s a Wikipedia page that explains more, but to be honest I got lost halfway through the second sentence.
Anyway, the Hough Transform Camera does several things when you activate it and point it at something. First, it ditches all the color information and makes the image grayscale only. Then it looks for edges (using something called Sobel edge detection), particularly straight line edges.
I’ll let Dominik explain the last step: “When you watch straight lines with my app, those lines will become light dots in the transformed image. The x-position tells you the direction/angle of that line and the y-position the distance of it from the center.”
Got that? Good. Perhaps you can explain it to me one day.
It doesn’t matter whether you understand the science or not. The end product is a fun little app that converts the real world into gorgeous colored graphs of pure mathematics.
You want some examples? OK. Here’s the stairwell in my house:
And this is a plastic crate in our store room:
And I can’t actually remember what this is:
That’s what I call beauty in the mundane.
Hough Transform Camera is free, supported by iAds, and well worth playing around with. Show it to the kids, it’ll make their eyes (and their minds) boggle.
