On calling Ceres from Scala - 1.0: What / Why / Where

What?

This is the first item of a multipart series on my experience of porting the Ceres Solver Library to the Scala programming language. This is still a work in progress, and I intend to document here my work notes, design decisions, etc., in the hope that someone else may find them useful.

Here and afterwards, this "port" is meant to include at least a few separate categories of code:

• JNI interfaces allowing the call of the Ceres library itself from the JVM. This involves the specification of the type and controlling parameters for the solver to be run, as well as the data to be used
• Client-side Scala code called by the solver itself to evaluate cost functors and its derivatives during execution.
• "Utility" Scala code to inspect/verify a solver specification and solution run
• Unit and integration tests for all the above.

Why?

First, because it's fun (at least for a nerd like myself). 

Second, it's a shame that a nice programming language like Scala is not more widely used by the computer vision / photogrammetry community for use cases (and they are the majority) where speed is not of paramount concern. I consider the usual alternative for writing quick prototypes, Python, far inferior to Scala in situation where a move from prototype to production code seems likely. 

So, this work is in pursuit of a hobby, but with the ambition of making something useful for the Scala and vision communities at large.

Where?

All the code will be posted to github. Stay tuned for more