Serdar Anıl DemirbaşLatest writinghttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/Thermal imaging for detection work: what changes when light becomes heathttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/thermal-imaging-basics/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/thermal-imaging-basics/A thermal camera does not see light, it sees temperature. That breaks half of your RGB intuition. What I had to relearn to do detection on the thermal channel.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe gap between the notebook and the boardhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/the-gap-between-the-notebook-and-the-board/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/the-gap-between-the-notebook-and-the-board/A detector that scores well on a workstation and fails on an embedded target is usually not a model problem. Four places the gap actually opens up.Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhy I labelled it a shot candidate and not a goalhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/why-i-labelled-it-shot-candidate/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/why-i-labelled-it-shot-candidate/Building event detection from ball trajectory on uncalibrated footage, and why naming the limitation in the output was cheaper than pretending it was not there.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTNMS and confidence thresholds: the last, underrated step of detectionhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/nms-and-confidence-thresholds/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/nms-and-confidence-thresholds/Your detector outputs thousands of candidate boxes per frame. Two cheap post-processing choices decide what anyone actually sees, and they get far less attention than they deserve.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe dataset decisions that decide your mAP before training startshttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/dataset-decisions-that-decide-your-map/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/dataset-decisions-that-decide-your-map/Tiling overlap, leakage-free splits and class-balanced augmentation did more for our aerial detector than any hyperparameter. Here is what we changed and why.Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTImage stitching and orthomosaics: turning frames into a maphttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/image-stitching-orthomosaics/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/image-stitching-orthomosaics/How a few hundred overlapping drone frames become one image, why a panorama is not a map, and the flight-planning decisions that matter more than the algorithm.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCamera calibration and lens distortion: why your straight lines bendhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/camera-calibration-distortion/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/camera-calibration-distortion/The runway is straight, the image says otherwise. What calibration actually estimates, how I run the checkerboard ritual, and where uncorrected distortion bites a mapping pipeline.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTROS 2 for vision systems: nodes, topics and what actually mattershttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/ros2-for-vision-systems/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/ros2-for-vision-systems/Notes from putting ROS 2 on the table while designing a SUAS mission architecture: what nodes, topics and QoS buy a vision pipeline, and when a small system does not need them.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Kalman filter without the matrix foghttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/kalman-filter-intuition/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/kalman-filter-intuition/Every tracker I have shipped sits on a Kalman filter, and none of them needed the full matrix derivation to work. Here is the intuition that actually matters.Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTObject tracking and ByteTrack: keeping identity across frameshttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/object-tracking-and-bytetrack/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/object-tracking-and-bytetrack/A detector tells you what is in a frame. Tracking tells you it is the same thing as last frame. Why that matters, and why ByteTrack's one idea works so well.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTTensorRT and FP16: getting a trained model onto real hardwarehttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/tensorrt-fp16-deployment/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/tensorrt-fp16-deployment/A trained checkpoint is not a product. What TensorRT actually does, why FP16 is usually free, and the checks I run before I trust an engine on a Jetson.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTDetecting animal disease with computer vision: a field worth building inhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/animal-disease-detection-with-cv/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/animal-disease-detection-with-cv/Every hard problem in livestock health monitoring is one I already work on: tracking, thermal imaging, ugly data, edge deployment. Notes on why this field deserves more engineers.Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTCan you do computer vision on a VR headset?https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/computer-vision-on-vr-devices/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/computer-vision-on-vr-devices/A standalone headset already runs more computer vision than most robots. The real question is how much of that your own code gets to use, and what it costs.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTDeveloping for Oculus/Meta Quest: notes from shipped projectshttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/developing-for-oculus-quest/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/developing-for-oculus-quest/The Quest is a mobile chip strapped to your face. Frame rate is a contract, the editor lies, and comfort cannot be patched in later. Notes from shipped training projects.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTVR, AR, XR: what the letters mean when you build for themhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/vr-ar-xr-differences/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/vr-ar-xr-differences/In meetings the three letters get used interchangeably. In the engine they decide who renders the world, what your frame budget is and what failure looks like.Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTOpenMP vs CUDA: two kinds of parallel, one real-time budgethttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/openmp-vs-cuda/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/openmp-vs-cuda/I use OpenMP and CUDA in the same real-time vision pipeline. Which one fits which job, why data movement is the real bill, and who actually eats your frame budget.Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTCUDA, CUDA C and the OpenCV CUDA module: which one are you actually using?https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/cuda-cuda-c-opencv/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/cuda-cuda-c-opencv/Three different things share the CUDA name and people mix them up daily. The platform, the language and the library have different costs, and picking the wrong layer wastes weeks.Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTSetting up an NVIDIA Jetson: JetPack, first boot and the road to TensorRThttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/jetson-setup-jetpack/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/jetson-setup-jetpack/Every Jetson project I have worked on lost days to setup before it processed a single frame. Here is the order that stops the leak: version choice, power mode, the right wheels, then TensorRT.Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMTC++ multithreading for real-time pipelines: the parts that bitehttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/cpp-multithreading-for-realtime/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/cpp-multithreading-for-realtime/Capture, inference, tracking and a Qt interface, all sharing one machine. What I learned about threads from keeping a detection pipeline honest under a real-time budget.Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTWhat the FFT actually does, and what it does for imageshttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/fft-for-image-processing/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/fft-for-image-processing/The Fourier transform is not a formula to memorise, it is a change of viewpoint. What that viewpoint buys you in a real vision pipeline, and where it does not help at all.Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTThe image processing fundamentals I still use every weekhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/image-processing-fundamentals/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/image-processing-fundamentals/Thresholding, morphology and contours built my first robot, and they still carry my detection pipelines. A tour of the classics that refuse to retire.Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMTGit and GitHub: the five habits that actually matterhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/git-and-github-for-engineers/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/git-and-github-for-engineers/Not forty commands. Five habits: commit messages that record why, one branch per experiment, data out of the repo, reading your own diff, and tagging what ships.Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 GMTBuilding operator interfaces in Qt: lessons from the fieldhttps://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/qt-operator-interfaces/https://www.serdaranildemirbas.site/blog/qt-operator-interfaces/The model gets the attention, but the operator screen decides whether the system is usable. What I learned building Qt interfaces for real-time tracking systems.Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT