Week 8: Nothing to See Here, Please Disperse

March 31, 2016

Hello! I am sorry to report that absolutely no progress has been made this past week. Fortunately, I am 95% confident that this will be the last lacking week, because my advisor will return soon and everything will pick back up! Fingers crossed for lots of progress.

Week 7: What We Have Here is a Lack of Communication

March 25, 2016

At a Standstill

After my last post, in which little to no progress was made, I am happy to report that little to some progress has been made! The root of all this un-productivity is the fact that my advisor has been out of town for the past two weeks, and I am more or less incapable of doing my project without the advice of my advisor. This is because I am not one with the ways of the computer so I really need help figuring things out. In addition, the programs I using to carry out my tests and tasks are in no way intuitive, so a teacher who knows the programs is necessary.

Some Forward Motion

I mentioned above that some progress has been made. This progress comes in the form of learning how to use the Virtual Linux. Within the Virtual Linux, I have to use the Terminal application that I talked about in Week 1 in order to do many things.

One of the programs I'm using on the Linux is called QView. Don't ask me what the Q stands for... Within this program I can manipulate different pairs of images (if qview displays more than two images, it moves unbearably slowly). Here's an example:

I'm supposed to be able to pick match points between the images by hand using this program, but for now, all I've encountered is frustration. As I said before, it's not exactly intuitive. Until my advisor returns from his travels and is able to rescue me from the land of research project limbo, this will remain the state of my project.

Until next time!

Week 6: Limbo

March 10, 2016

Hola, amigos! Unfortunately, this week was very unproductive so I don't have much to report. The lack of progress is due to some logistical issues.

Like I talked about last week, I began working on the manual selection of match points this week, but I didn't get very far. This is because in order to do manual matching, I have to use a program that was developed by the USGS on Linux computers and still only works on Linux computers. To get around this, I need to use a "virtual machine" which emulates another computer's operating system on my computer.

Using a Scientific Linux on my Mac (How cool!)

The problem is that the good folks at the USGS are working on a way of accessing outside drives through this virtual box, and because they haven't yet come up with a way to do this, I'm sitting here in limbo until they get that all figured out. In addition, my external advisor has been swamped with meetings and deadlines and such all week so we haven't had a lot of opportunities to meet and discuss the project. Fingers crossed that everything is resolved soon!

Week 5: More Tests, New Algorithm

March 3, 2016

Woohoo! More testing! If you've been keeping up with my blog, you'll know that last week my advisor told me that we would be using a new method to find match points that would hopefully be more accurate. This method, which uses the "Fundamental Matrix" should be more accurate and make it easier to find errors. I still don't entirely (or at all) understand how the Fundamental Matrix works (thanks Saxon math...), but that's okay because I just need to understand how to use it in the program.

The Results

Here are some of the results we got when using the Fundamental Matrix method compared to the homography method. As you can see, in a couple different image situations, the fundamental matrix gave more match points. If you look at the corresponding images, you'll notice that in addition to more match points, the fundamental matrix gives a slightly more evenly distributed set of points than the homography.

Image Set	Number of Points
Control - Homography	624
Control - Fundamental Matrix	827
5º Rotation - Homography	482
5º Rotation - Fundamental Matrix	574

Control - Homography

Control - Fundamental Matrix

Rotation - Homography

Rotation - Fundamental Matrix

Based on these results, I think we will begin replacing the homography with the fundamental matrix and epipolar lines.

Looking Ahead

Next week, the plan is for my advisor to teach me how to use the OpenCV software to choose manual match points. Once I get that down, we will be comparing the quality of automated chosen match points to the quality of our manually chosen match points. We'll see how it goes!