Creating a side-scroller mobile game with Unreal Engine 4 (Part 5): Creating a Boss Enemy

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Welcome back to part 5 of our series exploring how to build a side-scroller mobile game with Unreal Engine 4. If you haven’t yet read part 4, I’d recommend reading it here:

In the last part, we integrated our winning and losing mechanisms. Here, we’ll work on creating a boss enemy to make our game a bit more challenging.

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Detecting objects in videos and camera feeds using Keras, OpenCV, and ImageAI

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Object detection is a branch of computer vision, in which visually observable objects that are in images of videos can be detected, localized, and recognized by computers.

An image is a single frame that captures a single-static instance of a naturally occurring event . On the other hand, a video contains many instances of static images displayed in one second, inducing the effect of viewing a naturally occurring event.

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Constructing a 3D Face Mesh from Face Landmarks in Real-Time with TensorFlow.js and Plot.js

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TensorFlow.js is a very powerful library when it comes to using deep learning models directly in the browser. It includes support for a wide range of functions, covering basic machine learning, deep learning, and even model deployment.

Another important feature of Tensorflow.js is the ability to use existing pre-trained models for quickly building exciting and cool applications.

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SwiftUI: Data Driven UI

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When building an app, sometimes we find ourselves creating data just so we can see our UI start to come to life. Whether we’re adding a new feature, making a POC (proof of concept), or starting from scratch, it’s very easy to just put data together for the sake of it.

For instance, we’ve been building a Team Profiles app to learn SwiftUI. And, so far, we’ve managed to make a class for our Profiles, but even with just three instances, our UI code looks bulky. It takes up more space in our code than the actual UI code does in the ContentView!

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Superimpose X: Bringing professional photo editing tools to smartphones with mobile machine learning

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When working with standard photo editors, users will generally encounter a common suite of tools — scaling, cropping, color, rotation, blurring, filtering, etc.

But what do users do when they want something a little more powerful and complex? Until recently, the answer has most likely been to transfer photos to powerful desktop editing platforms.

But heavyweight editing tools can be both difficult to learn and cost-prohibitive. And with recent advances in smartphone cameras, more and more high-quality photography is happening on mobile devices. Moving back and forth between a phone’s camera roll and desktop software can quickly become cumbersome, especially when working with multiple images.

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Replace the Background in Facebook’s Spark AR Studio

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Unnecessary background within an image, photograph, or video makes the image lose its focal point. By removing the background, we can draw the attention of the viewer back to the focal point, thereby making the image more informative and easy to view.

In this article, we will learn to create segmentation and the camera texture to create an effect that replaces unnecessary background in Facebook’s Spark AR Studio. We will make use of a segmentation mask texture to separate the foreground and background of the scene. Then, we will implement the camera texture to a material in the foreground to stream a video of the person using the effect back into the scene. You can then transform the environment behind them and replace the background.

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Resampling to Properly Handle Imbalanced Datasets in Machine Learning

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Often in machine learning, and specifically with classification problems, we encounter imbalanced datasets. This typically refers to an issue where the classes are not represented equally, which can cause huge problems for some algorithms.

In this article, we’ll explore a technique called resampling, which is used to reduce this effect on our machine learning algorithms.

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Seaborn Heatmaps: 13 Ways to Customize Correlation Matrix Visualizations

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For data scientists, checking correlations is an important part of the exploratory data analysis process. This analysis is one of the methods used to decide which features affect the target variable the most, and in turn, get used in predicting this target variable. In other words, it’s a commonly-used method for feature selection in machine learning.

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Safer and Smarter: Contactless shopping with on-device object detection

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In these unprecedented times involving a worldwide pandemic, many changes have taken place in our daily lives. To ensure the safety and well being of all, many protocols and guidelines have been implemented across society, such as maintaining a minimum distance or limiting physical contact with exposed and shared surfaces.

Businesses are getting creative by adapting their shopping experiences to ensure the safety of their customers and employees. Contactless services have become more of a necessity than a fad, and technology has evolved to keep pace with these newfound demands. Many stores have standardized Scan & Go technology, which allows customers to scan item barcodes and pay using just their smartphones, thus limiting human contact and providing a faster, simpler alternative.

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