Month: July 2012

Day 328 of 1000

Today, the kids need to spend most of the day at the Hill Library at NCSU again, so I will have a good block of time to start figuring out how to find the license plate on the back of the car.  I spent some time looking at images of cars and reading about approaches to find the plates.  Like all general machine vision problems, it is harder than it looks.  Sometimes there are no or very few edges that define the outer boundaries of the plate, so it is not generally a good idea to look only for the shape of the plate.  They only thing you can really depend on is that the characters on the plate are of high contrast.  I am going to look for some images that will get me started.  I will probably start with three or four images to get a concept going, then expand my efforts to increasing data sets.  I think I probably should take my camera with me to take some pictures today.  Maybe I will post a few.

Day 327 of 1000

It is amazing to me that some men do not model masculine behavior to their sons.  Boys should be taught to take responsibility for social and other situations.  It boggles my mind when that does not happen.  It is not only a matter of masculinity, but of good manners to stand up and be counted.

Day 326 of 1000

We had a few days of heat a week or so back up around 105 degrees.  Then we got a series of thunderstorms that brought the high temperature down to about 85.  That would not be so bad if it were not so muggy.  It is about the opposite here as in Oregon.  In Oregon there are about eight months of drizzle followed by four months of the most beautiful place and weather in the world.  The good months are in the summer.  In North Carolina there are about eight months of good weather (I count the two or three weeks of freezing and snow as good because that is they way I was made), followed by four months of humid inferno.  Maybe what we ought to do is try to figure out a way to live in North Carolina during the Fall, Winter, and Spring, then head out to Oregon for the summer.

It seems kind of crazy that the places that seem to be prospering most in the current economic climate have about the worst weather conditions in the lower 48–Texas, North Dakota, Montana.  What is that all about.  I guess if you are tough, you can handle all conditions climate and economic.

Day 325 of 1000

Both Kelly and Christian are taking a compressed semester class this summer.  The classes are normally given over a period of 16 weeks, but during the summer they are given in five weeks.  The classes meet every day of the week for an hour and a half.  Kelly is taking a three hour class in Foundations of Advanced math–a proofs class, so that is here entire class load.  Christian’s class includes a lab, so he spends a LOT of time on campus.  The thing that is kind of surprising to me is that they seem to be assimilating the material very well even though both of them literally need to learn a new language with a new “alphabet” in just five weeks.  They have just about as much homework as they did when they had a full course load spread of 16 weeks.  They are doing OK so far, but the big tests will start next week.

Christian has to get up in his Chemistry lab sessions and explain how he solved problems.  He asked me how to teach.  The only thing I could think to tell him was practice.  He has a stellar Chemistry professor that explains things very, very well.  Kelly is in an even better situation with an emeritus professor who is 75 years old that comes back during the summer to teach on class out of love for the material.  The students in both classes know exactly what to expect and the professors articulate the material very well in class.  What a gift.

Day 324 of 1000

My buddy Brett from my current job and I went out to dinner with four guys from a company I pretty much desipise.  It is a large machine vision company with its headquarters in the Northeast who have practices and attitudes I have found to be very suspect over the years.  They have a bad reputation in the industry and an inflated opinion about the quality of thier products.  After the somewhat restrained business discussions we went out to dinner with these guys and had a great time.  Even though the company is from the Northeast and has the attitude and morality you might expect from a company from that part of the world, all the guys with whom we met were from the Southeast.  One of them even gratuated from the Citadel.  We had a great time.  They were good guys and, I hate to admit it, might have been more redneck than me.  The funny deal is that they were wildly more informed about all things political than anyone I have every met from the area around their world headquarters.  I was very pleasantly surprised and am looking forward to doing business with them in the future.

Day 322 of 1000

I read an article today from the Washington Post titled U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there.  I know they are not a very credible source–I am kind of embarrassed citing anything from the NYT or the WP, but this one took the cake.  The article is about highly degreed people in scientific fields who do not have jobs.  The problem with the article is that it talks almost exclusively about people working in chemistry, biology, and medical disciplines.  The word math shows up only once in the article while engineer and engineering also only show up once each.  It is especially hilarious that the first person with a “science” degree described in the article got her PhD in neuroscience.

It has been my premise that people who can handle the math (including hard statistics) have plenty of opportunities.  No one capable of doing hard math has lacked for opportunities, even during the persistent and growing under employment and unemployment that is a staple of the Obama recession.  I know this anecdotally from the number of headhunter calls I get asking for help in finding technical programmers.  You will find a list of graphs on the Business Insider website, here, that puts numbers to this phenomenon.

Just another reason to drop your subscription to the Washington Post and get a math, statistics, or engineering degree.

Day 321 of 1000

Another day at the Hill Library on the NCSU campus.  The kids are studying math and chemistry.  I think I get more done in this enviroment than any other.  Today I was able to align the individual frames from the videos I have been using, perform background suppression and accentuate the things in the image that are in motion.  The result is pretty noisy, but we know things about the items we want to find in the image that will help us isolate them to tell us the information we want.  I do not have any pictures to put up today because I need to do some additional pre and post processing to make them show what we have done.  Still, I am very satisfied and still might have something to show by the end of the weekend.

Day 318 of 1000

Happy 4^th of July!  I got up early to work on our CoffeeVision project.  Yes, it has a name.  I picked CoffeeVision because I couldn’t think of anything else.  If it comes to anything, we will probably change the name.  We are still very early in the process.  I got most of this done before the family all went out to McDonalds for lunch.  It has been a great day so far.  Today, I added the ability to import videos to the machine vision image processing buffer a frame at a time.  We need a framework for development and testing.  This is it.  I have added a YouTube video to show and explain what we did.  I need to add just a little more infrastructure before I can start adding code to analyze the images.

Day 315 of 1000

This is the first time in many election cycles that my father-in-law did not work in one of the voting casillas.  This is a very big election with what appears to be no good choices.  My biggest fear in this election is that the people are so feed up with years of corruption, they will vote for anyone other than the two main parties, the PAN and the PRI.  The problem with that is the man they might elect is a good friend of Hugo Chavez and could take Mexico down the path taken by Cuba and Venezuela.  That would be a very sad turn of event.  Lorena will call her mom in a couple of hours to hear how it went.  She will call her dad now to get his take on the whole thing.