Week of 11/5

I'd call it a successful week.

Monday, I read through the entire math section in the Siggraph document. Parts of it took a while but I feel I was really able to understand almost all of it, including partially understanding the partial derivatives.  The partial derivatives are just used for minimizing to find the optimal approximate intersection between two lines.  This likely won't really need to be a focus point in our document/presentation.  Anyways, back to the other stuff; I am glad I re-read it.  In fact I wasn't even sure I ever read the coordinate system part.  It helped to show a piece we had missed as far as the inverse intrinsic matrix goes.

We met on Tuesday primarily to finish up the mathematics pipeline.  It started out fairly rough once we hit solving for lambda.  It took some time and was frustrating.  But then I looked back at the document and found a way to do it, clearing a main hitch.  From there it was fairly straightforward.  One main question remaining is the z-component of the real image coordinates.

We met with Dr. Wolff after the tech-talk and I walked through the math.  He seemed quite pleased and offered an additional piece we had missed as far as the distortion parameters went.  I feel from last Tuesday to the end of this Tuesday, at least for me, I now understand the main processes much better.  Obviously it is still in mathematical-type pseudo-code, but it is a critical foundation we can build on.

For our next meeting, we are working on a few different things, namely some of the following:

• More accuracy for red plot: taking the R value from the BGR rather than the V value from HSV
• Red plot location accuracy (coordinate rather than a pixel value); how to better determine point (left side of laser?)
• Motor/circuitry (GRADY)
• LaTeX for the math pieces (JEFF--Done Thursday 11/8)
• Settings for camera from OpenCV
• OpenCV undistortPoints method
• Using K^-1 and Distort parameters
• What about the z-component of our image?

Grady has hit a bit of a hitch in the circuit code compilation from within Visual Studio.  But hopefully he can figure it out; we have Windows installed on two machines now and will work on getting them configured more fully.

Again, Tyler is at a disadvantage at this point as he hasn't taken linear algebra or graphics, but he did read (and take notes) on at least a good chunk of the Siggraph math portion and worked on learning some basic matrix calculation procedures.

All in all, a successful week.  Things are lining up nicely.  Design document looms in the future.  And we are on a good track...