Day 23: Research Symposium

Today was an interesting day in which I was late to pretty much everything. My friend Hannah also came for the research symposium and to see what I was working on for this internship. I was late to pick her up.

We went to the CIS building first then decided to join everyone for breakfast in a different building. The other interns were just leaving when we arrived because breakfast was practically over at that point. We ate some scones, the only food left, but appreciating the free food.

There was one presentation I was especially interested in. It was about music source identification and I had participated in an experiment for it (see day 13). This presentation was not until 12:00, so I decided to show Hannah my work on ENVI and the Gough Map first. As I was explaining the many processing methods, I realized that this was a good way to practice for the final presentation. It was also a wake-up call for me to look over how PCA works again...

When my explanation of Gough Map stuff was over, it was only 11. With an hour to spare before the presentation, Hannah and I went to Java Wally's and had their chai lattes, which I highly recommend. As expected, we somehow lost track of time and it was only a few minutes before 12 when we realized we were about to miss the presentation.

We sped back to the Louise Slaughter building but had trouble finding the room the presentation was in. When we finally found it, the door was shut and we were late by 8 minutes. We decided not to barge in right in the middle of the presentation.

We were very disappointed to have missed the presentation, but it was time for lunch and that lifted our spirits. After some confusion regarding blue vs. red tickets, we found the room we would be having lunch in (and we weren't late, good job). There was a lunch speaker who talked about her goal to make solar panels more common in Rochester. I was intrigued by her story and inspired by her dedication to improve this city.

After lunch, Hannah and I leafed through the symposium packet and picked a different presentation to attend. This one was about the emotional and physiological responses people have when reading about interpersonal violence. We thought this topic would be relatively easy to follow, but we ended up a little confused. We assumed we were not the presenter's target audience. And by the way, we were late to this presentation (but only by a minute).

Going along with the day's theme of tardiness, Hannah and I had hoped to go to Ben and Jerry's after the presentation and take advantage of their 50% off Friday deal. After fast-walking across what seemed like the entire campus, we arrived at 2:10. Ben and Jerry's closed at 2.

Day 22

Today, I mostly wrapped up my work on ENVI. I selected a few of my best results to send to Oxford. Afterwards, I finally got to work on the Codex Selden (the Mexican one) after Di saved me from having to wait 10 years for results to load. The codex images had over 900 bands originally and had to be reduced to around 300 so that programs could run faster on it. I tampered with Di's image reduction code for a while with little success. Thankfully, he came to the rescue before I almost overloaded and destroyed his custom-made code.

So I found out that Blur and Divide does not seem to like the codex.

On the left is the RGB image of a section of the document. The result of Blur and Divide on a Match Filter result is on the right.

Oh wait, you probably can't see anything...well that's because there's nothing there. At first I thought I had clicked the wrong buttons, but I redid the entire process and was once again met with a blank square with random black specks scattered sparsely throughout (which you can't see now because the picture is too small).

On the other hand, Blur and Subtract (a different form of "spectral math") appeared to be more promising. At least there was something in the resulting image.

Although subtraction seems to work better than division in this case, I still think that "Blur and Divide" is a cooler name.










I believe I am officially done with processing images of the Gough Map. I may attempt to get more out of the Codex Selden but I'm not sure how significant my finds are. I will definitely start to make my PowerPoint soon.

Oh, also- we played a game of Apples to Apples during lunch as a means of lowering stress levels. Being the studious intellects we are, the game was taken quite seriously. It may have possibly increased stress instead. I'm kidding. Our stress level either decreased...or remained the same. But really, it was a fun game.

Day 21: Movie Night Attempt 1

There are only 2 weeks left of this internship. This fact hit me hard, along with the realization that I will have to gather all my results and compile them into a presentation that I will be showing to a large, intimidating audience in only 14 days.

With the home stretch before us, Dr. Messinger, Allyse and I have planned a rough breakdown of the 2 remaining weeks. After running ENVI processing on a couple more chips and hopefully a quick look at the Mexican codex, we plan on starting to make our presentation at the beginning of next week. Pretty much, the sooner we finish processing the data, the sooner we will finish the presentation, and the more time we will have to rehearse it. This is intense.

Backtracking a bit to this morning, we got a tutorial on how to use RIT's library database. Dr. Boateng gave us many research tools that will be helpful in the future. I also found out that I am locked out of my RIT account! Oops.

Dr. Messinger showed Allyse and me a greatly compressed version of the 100-slide powerpoint we had made of our Gough Map results. We will select several more significant results, created recently, to add to this powerpoint. Then, we will send it off to Oxford.....exciting!! Also, Dr. Messinger is trying to arrange a time that we can Skype his colleagues in England. Also very exciting.

The lunch talk topic was very interesting, but sadly, I had gotten minimal sleep last night and my attention span was very short.

Allyse and I got introduced to Roger Easton. This is a big deal. He is famous and highly regarded, especially at the imaging center. I had read a book that talked about his involvement in restoring the Archimedes Palimpsest.

All the interns gathered for a movie that was scheduled for 3:00 but started sometime closer to 3:40 due to technical issues...and Z-How [sic]. We watched about an hour of the Dark Knight. Not what we were shooting for, but that's ok. Our movie will be showing tomorrow and at random pockets of free time until we finish it.

Day 20: Bring Your Friend(s) Day

Today was exciting. I got to show my friend Molly everything I have been doing during this internship so far. Dr. Messinger gave a concise explanation of our work and the purpose of document restoration. I then gave a short demo of the different ENVI processes we have been using on the Gough Map.

We got a delicious free lunch at Salsarita's. Molly and I were feeling adventurous and ordered Poquitos for dessert. They were like very not dense donut holes coated in sugar. We enjoyed them and decided that our adventurous decision was worth it.

After lunch, we had the most successful volleyball game yet. I figured that this may be a result of the increased amount of players on the field allowing for greater surface area covered and higher chance of someone being in a position to hit the ball. Regardless, we felt pretty proud when we actually had consecutive volleys. Our practice must be paying off, just in time for the Olympics!

Later, Cici and I taught everyone how to play the game Contact. It was actually very hard to explain so no, sorry, I'm not going to explain it again on this blog. In short, it involved guessing words and "reading minds."

Apparently we were in a mood for group games, so we also had a friendly competition of Pictionary on the Reading Room whiteboard. It started when Molly drew something that I was supposed to determine as Winston Churchill. With my knowledge on historical figures being extremely flaky, I was absolutely clueless until Emily walked over and figured it out in a millisecond.

Molly and I left at 3:00 for her 3:30 eye-tracking experiment in the Color Building. We decided to give ourselves ample time to search for the location to accommodate for the fact that we were slightly directionally challenged. We reached the building attached to the Color Building and walked in confused circles there until we came to the realization that the Color Building was one floor down.

Molly finished the experiment in a recording setting time of 15 minutes (it was supposed to take 30 minutes). We really felt like having some icecream to celebrate this impressive feat. The internet claimed that the RIT Ben and Jerry's was open at the moment: "Tuesday hours: 11:00-21:00" (military time I guess). You can probably guess what happened. Yup, that's correct! After walking across the entire campus, we were faced with the disappointing fact that Ben and Jerry's was closed.

We were crushed by this discovery, but it did not cease our quest for food. We found a coffee shop (that I forgot the name of) and got lattes and frappes. Not as good as icecream, but still good.

So that was my day: food, fun, and friends!

Presentation Outline

Enhancement of Hyperspectral Imagery of Historical Documents

Presentation Outline

Abstract/ Project Introduction and Description (1)

• Historical Documents
• Spectral Imaging
• Spatial/ Spectral Image Processing
• Spectral (color)
• Spatial (brightness and location)

Hyperspectral Imaging (1)

• Define: Collecting hundreds of colors
• Pictures of Oxford Set-up
• Example of spectra of images

Processing (2)

• Overview
• ENVI
• Classification
• PCA Signature Matching (SAM, ACE, MF)
• Spatial Processing

Classification (1)

• K-means, Mahalanobis Distance, etc.
• Example (picture of each)

PCA (1)

• Explanation and visualization
• Example (picture)

Di's masks in PCA (1)

• Picture and explanation

Signature Matching (1)

• SAM [ACE, MF]
• Reference spectrum to compare
• Examples (pictures)

Spatial (1)

• Blur and Divide
• Examples (pictures)

Gough Map (1)

• History
• What’s in it
• What we’re looking for
• Data

Pictures of Gough Map (3)

• Big picture (high resolution)
• Big picture (HSI [“data” picture file], used for processing)\)
• Zoom ins

Results (7-10)

• Pictures, spectral graphs, etc.

Summary (1)

Day 18

Today was a short day for me since I had to leave early for a trip over the weekend. I was able to work on my Gough Map chips in the morning. More PCA, SAM, and classification. So really, nothing new.

For the lunch cookout, we had kielbasa and Italian sausages, grilled to perfection by Emily. I was there to give her useful grilling tips and advice. (This is sarcasm, I only distracted her.) But in all seriousness, Emily did a great job on the grill, considering she had little previous experience.

The interns attempted another volleyball game. Before long, we succumbed to the heat and the fact that we struggle as volleyball players and decided to play frisbee in the shade instead. We decided that frisbee would be a more forgiving and less physically taxing activity.

Field Trip Day!

Today, we finally got to go on the field trip we had planned a couple weeks ago. I was surprised by how nice our transportation was. The bus had comfortable seating, wifi that worked briefly, and strong air-conditioning.

The Eastman museum tour was about 2 hours long. We saw a room with old cameras and famous pictures (and had a great tour guide), then we saw the conservation room. The conservation tour guide seemed a tiny bit scared that we would touch everything with our grubby fingers and mess up the state-of-the-art restoration facility. He talked about the different processes involved in preservation, which was very interesting. I really wish we got to see him restoring a document, though.

Those galleries were the only two we got to see. Oh well...I was starving anyways. We got to go to Amiel's afterwards via the nice bus. The best part was realizing that they had chocolate milk there.

It was so hard to focus on working after we got back to RIT. I did make progress, though, and reached chip 28/32 by the end of the day. Not bad. If I'm extra efficient, I'll finish all 32 tomorrow.