Thursday 26 March 2009

Almost Wedding Time!

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I got engaged last year (http://www.bv2.co.uk/?p=310). Time really does fly and we are getting married in less than two weeks time! :)    I might even post a few photos here :)

This news hopefully explains the lack of updates on any projects lately although I have done a bit of work on the raytracer.  Interestingly some of the ray tracer accelerations can also be used in the fluid modelling project with a few tweaks.  On the visualization interface front I've been playing a bit more with the new qt4.5 and it is pretty decent. I'm still loving the new IDE.  But....  in terms of quickly making an extensible, good looking and function interface Flex 3 is winning by a large margin.  Actually I should clarify that the flex isnt actually doing any calculations its merely displaying images it is retrieving from the rendering service. If the app itself was calculating and rendering then I would probably pick qt4.  Personally I like the idea of seperate bits doing things on their own, which is nice for redundancy / scalability but not everyone likes to work in this manner.



On the work front I've been frantically getting everything nice and ship shape before I'm off on leave for two weeks. Normally work is quite boring intellectually speaking but last week I needed to apply more than the normal trivial amount of image processing to some images. (I work in a company that supplies software for document comparisons and analysis).  I had to basically recognize a form that over the course of history had been modified and saved in various ways resulting in something that to the human eye was similar but to a simple form templating system was completely unintelligible.  After cleaning up image noise and running an edge detector (Canny) I then ran the resultant image through a hough Transform. Then took the polar image and did a peak detection on it. This gave a neat set of lines (and angles) from which it was easy to identify the best match areas to our form and from there a simple case of extracting the image area for ocr'ing.  (including a sanity check on field types / names). Probably the most fun in work programming I've had in two years.

I'll pop up another post later today / tomorrow regarding a query on Canny edge detectors then I'm off for two weeks :) I will answer emails as usual but probably only every second or third day.  If you dont get an answer to your email please post a comment here as my spam filter sometimes gets a bit over enthusiastic.

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