January 22, 2016
My name is Jacob Moul and I'm a senior at BASIS Flagstaff. As you can probably tell from the title of my blog, my senior research project has to do with planetary images.I chose this project with the primary purpose of learning computer programming. Many college students and recent college graduates I know have extolled the value of being familiar with Computer Science in today's workforce, so I figured I might as well start early. In addition, I find this field extremely interesting for many reasons, including the fact that computer programming allows you to make things from scratch.
Some of you may be asking, "What on Earth is image matching?" I have an answer! Image matching is the process of taking two or more images of the same subject, with each image capturing a different part of the scene, and stitching the images together so that they create one large, coherent image.
"What does coding have to do with it??" I have an answer for that too! Image matching was a manual process at one point, and in some fields images are still matched by hand. However, in the field of planetary data collection, manual matching is not at all feasible due to the mind-blowing amount of data coming in from various satellites and telescopes and what have you. This is where coding comes in: various algorithms have been developed to automatically stitch all of these images together. But like anything developed by humans, these algorithms are not perfect; my project will be attempting to help the US Geological Survey improve their image matching algorithms.
If you're interested in learning more about the USGS Astrogeology Science Center (the location of my internship), just follow this link: USGS Astrogeology Science Center
