Clubland and Thief Land

This weekend was spent in the city crashing various parties and going to the preview screening of hilarious and well acted Clubland.

As a side effect of leaving my car parked in the same spot for 2 days I also managed to get it broken into. Luckily I have nothing in the car and the car itself is not worth stealing, they even left my street directory behind. Next time I should a note saying ":Thank you for looking:".

TerraSAR-X up and running

So there was a launch and it reached orbit safely, now TerraSAR-X is providing nice images even in stripmap mode. Spotlight mode is going to be as good as most of the Optical systems, well samples remain to be seen. Here are links to the news item on the DLR site and a launch video.

Vision and Remote Sensing Image Processing

I started in the world of Image Processing through medical image processing, now I see increasing convergence between various Medical and otherwise Machine Vision algorithms and Remote Sensing Image Processing of data from Space and Airborne sensors.



3 Open Source projects illustrate the state of Open Art and probably most of art in this field:

1. Orfeo Toolbox - This project developed with blessings from CNES for processing the data from Cosmo-Skymed and Pleiades constellation. It pulls together ITK from the Medical Image processing world and various remote sensing libraries such as ossim and gdal to provide comprehensive image exploitation capabilities.
2. NASA Vision Workbench - Mainly a machine vision library intended for the Mars Rovers with some Cartographic functionality thrown in via the ever present gdal. The generic camera models - Pinhole(CAVHORE) and Line Scanner are implemented allowing expansion to both ground based and aerial/spacebased sensors.
3. Ossim-OpenCV extension - Ossim extension for the well known Intel OpenCV Library. This is a nascent project shows some promise in bringing the myriads of tried and tested ideas from the Machine Vision field to Remote Sensing. May be soon we will have real time face recognition and location from satellite images available to everyone - not just the NSA as shown in the movies.
   

Wine Tour

Finally back from the seafood and wine festival. The day went like a dream. Nice weather, sunny and no drizzle even in winter. Lots of happy people on the bus. And lots of good wine, did not pay much attention to the food. The Grenache and Fortified Shiraz were outstanding, as was the craziness from everyone on the way back.

MGS Portable Ops and Gram-Schmidt

Time now to tackle the next "boss" in the Portable Ops. Playing it in Japanese does not make it any easier. I have to make assumptions about the meaning of the mission briefs in addition to doing the missions, even after reading the rush guide. Grabbing and building up an unpaid army is always fun though, as is creating soldiers from Access Points Scans, brings new meaning to war driving. There should be a PSP Kismet.

I also tackled a complete ossim build with VC++ Express Whidbey and Microsoft's compiler runs significantly faster than the mingw-gcc. Had to deal with various vagaries though such as non-embedded manifests and small errors in the system headers. Congratulations to the ossim team for getting 1.6.8 out. With the build in place I experimented with implementing Gram-Schmidt algorithm for fusion. This tries to solve linear equations to model the relationship between panchromatic and spectral data and infer the right weighting to apply. Here are some preliminary results compared to Brovey - hey at least it works.