On calling Ceres from Scala - 6.0: Skeres 0.99 is released

This is the seventh installment of a series documenting my progress on porting the Ceres solver API to Scala. All my sources quoted below are available on github.

Skeres 0.99 is released

As hinted in my previous post, this one is to announce the release of a first working and nearly complete version of my SWIG wrap + port to Scala of the Ceres Solver API. The code is available in a Github repo, and has so far been only built and tested on my MacOS X notebook, though I expect minimal or no problems in running in on other UNIX-y systems.

For the build itself I went for the most straightforward solution:

• Bash script to drive SWIG-ing and compilation of the JNI C++ wrapping code.
• SBT for everything JVM-related thereafter.

The bash script itself fires up sbt in console mode after setting the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH so the JVM knows where to find the JNI wrapper DLL's. From there you can issue the "test" command to run all the unit tests, or head to "project examples" to run the examples. For instance, we can run my port of the simple bundle adjuster from the Ceres distribution's directory of examples, on the same data as provided therein:

What's missing?

Not much. Details are in the TODO.md file in the repo. Mostly documentation, porting of more examples, and a couple of the client-side goodies that Ceres provides, e.g. grid evaluation. Stay tuned for more.

Was it hard?

Not complaining at all. Most of the work was in porting to Scala the client-side auto-differentiation adapters for vector-valued cost functions of multiple vector-valued arguments, and in writing unit tests. Another boring but necessary slog (timewise) was the porting of the client-side utilities to handle rotation matrices, and their angle-axis and quaternion representations - the latter somewhat eased by the fact that spire direcly supports quaternions on fields.