Upcoming events…
One more week and then it’s spring break. It probably wont be that much of a break because I will be working on my CS Capstone project, but it should be nice nonetheless. Maybe I’ll finally get to that PS2 game I purchased months ago!
Senior presentations are quickly approaching, only a bit more than a month away. There will also be a practice run of my Math presentation a week after spring break, on Tuesday, April 10th. For those of you curious for more information about my projects I’m posting my two abstracts below.
Wavelets and Filters
Wavelets, which are localized waves, are an exciting new alternative to Fourier series to analyze mathematical signals. Some emerging applications of wavelets include data compression and feature extraction in sound and image processing, including the new JPEG2000 standard. We will specifically explore the Haar Wavelet, which is a pulse of 1 and -1 over a finite range. The Haar Wavelet is just one of many wavelets to have the important property of orthogonality and we will show how this can be used to establish a basis from a collection of wavelets.
Path Finding with Computer Vision
Computer vision is an exciting field in computer science with many practical applications in both civilian and military settings. Unfortunately, images are a complicated form of data for a computer system to interpret; but with computer vision, an application can be programmed to extract the desired information. The application I developed enables a LEGO MINDSTORMS rover to navigate a path, avoiding obstacles while moving towards a user-provided destination. Such automated responses are important when precise movement and quick reactions are required or when human guided movement is impractical. Images are gathered from an overhead camera and sent to a computer vision system where they are analyzed with a canny edge map to detect possible obstacles. The rover is then sent updated movement orders through an infrared transmitter to detour around the obstacles without human intervention. I will discuss the design of the application, the object detection algorithms that I implemented, and provide a demonstration of the rover in action.
Hope to see you in April!