Week 9: Aaaaaaand We're Back!

April 9, 2016

My advisor is back! That means that my project is back to business as usual. Unfortunately, business as usual means a lot of debugging. As my advisor says, that's the problem with being on the "bleeding edge" of technology like this: you're going to run into implementation problems no matter what you do.

The plan for the foreseeable future is the following:

1. Get all the code I'm using up to date with the code that's being written by developers at the USGS.
2. Figure out how to use the Linux programs in tandem with the software that I was using before.
3. Analyze the success of our matches.

Those are the main parts of my project going forward, and step 3 is going to take the most amount of time and will be the most involved. Although, based on the developments that have been made this week (namely bugs), Step 2 might take the longest.

Step 3 will involve many steps. First, I'll perform an image match. After the match has been completed, I'll look closely at the points that were created and do a blink comparison. This means that I'll pick a couple of points, probably one pair that corresponds to each of the images and then flash each image on the screen back and forth with the match point as a reference to see if there is any shift. A shift in this case would be the whole image moving a couple pixels to the right or left, or something similar. If a shift occurs, I'll try to determine how many pixels I'll need to move one of the points, and record what kind of manipulations I had to do.

This process was definitely not what my advisor told me verbatim, but it's close enough to understand the gist of what I'll be doing.

On a side note, I ran into an interesting problem this week where all the programs I was running on my computer taxed it completely and killed it; the memory filled completely and everything just stopped working all together. To fix this I had to get an external drive to store my virtual Linux on because I didn't realize that the Virtual Linux was really its on computer with its own memory and all that stuff (silly me!). So basically I had an entire computer on my computer (computer-ception) and that's super cool! I don't know how that escaped me.