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Segway-like robot helps fight fires with 3D, thermal imaging

In 2012, 83 firefighters died in the line of duty in the U.S. alone, and another 37 fatalities have been reported thus far in 2013. But, with better scouting tools, these numbers could be lowered.

Thank goodness for robots.

A new one out of the University of California, San Diego, may soon help first responders survey a fiery scene with its ability to enter a burning building and immediately transmit data on the state and location of the fire, the building's structural integrity, and the presence of any volatile gases -- all while on the lookout for survivors.… Read more

YUV w/o PITA

YUV video uses one carrier for luminance and two for chrominance to yield a better picture than other types of "component video," which are often mistaken for YUV. It's common in high-end video equipment as well as the MPEG-2 format used in DVDs. Sunray Images' YUVTools is a set of powerful utilities for playing, converting, analyzing, and editing YUV or RGB videos in their raw formats. It bundles the developer's YUVPlayer, YUVConverter, YUVAnalyzer, and YUVEditor, as well as other utilities such as two-way AVI-YUV conversion. The full-featured player accepts many different YUV/RGB file formats, including … Read more

Color capture tool

Pixeur offers artists a chance to capture a color they see on their computer screens. Designed for those who understand the technical details of color, this tool will appeal to anyone obsessed with color.

The program is a little confusing to understand, mostly because it completely lacks a Help file. Thankfully, there are on-screen instructions to aid users and the program's click-and-drag methods quickly become second nature. The program functions very simply. Users drag the circular icon from the Pixeur screen and roll it over a color they like on their screens. Once a user releases the mouse button … Read more

Microsoft hopes scRGB will improve photo colors

For a computer, dealing with color is just another math problem. And Microsoft wants to change the way your PC counts.

The company has developed a color space--a way to encode colors as numbers a computer can process--called scRGB. If the company succeeds in getting it to catch on, the technology could help add depth and richness to photos taken with digital cameras and viewed on a computer or TV screen.

Today's cameras and computers usually employ a color space called sRGB, developed in the 1990s by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, that describes colors as a particular combination of … Read more