Day 21

Today, we went to the REU student presentations. I was very confused the entire time. All the concepts that they had done their research in were much more complicated than my simple high schooler mind could understand! I do have some idea now, though, on how to format my presentation. I do hope that my audience won't be as lost as I was! I doubt that they will be, as my research this summer wasn't nearly on the level as some of these REU students.

Sinse I came back to the lab earlier than the other interns to finish yesterdays blog (I had to leave early for work and had no time to do it,) I spent at least an hour organizing my desktop. We are entering the end game now, about to start our presentations, so I figured it would be a good time to invest in organizing my results and documents. There are only two weeks left now until the internship is over! I can't believe how fast the time flew.

Day 20

Today, Hudson and I worked on creating a presentation that would explain our data analysis process: capturing with MISHA,  transferring data to our computers, feeding the images through our code, then processing with ENVI. Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful day. I processed more images through ENVI, but was mostly unsuccessful. Hudson and I need to start working on our final presentation, which is only two weeks away! I can't believe how fast this summer has gone. Tomorrow, we will be spending a majority of the day going to Undergraduate students presentations on their over the summer research projects. I assume that most of the presentation will go over my head, as I am a mere high schooler and they are college students. Hopefully I can pick up some pointers on how to my presentation though!

Day 19

Today was, again, spent on processing images on ENVI. I delved more into the features of ENVI, discovering some very useful (and un-useful) filters that I could apply to the documents. All of my work for today yielded little results- the best I got was a (possibly) clearer image of the corvette sticker.

I didn't work much on mosaicking today. I find that I have lost some motivation for it after yesterday. I will work more on that task tomorrow. I am very quickly finding that image processing is a much slower, and less rewarding, than coding. 

Day 18

Today we made progress on the corvette sticker! Today, Dr. Roger Easton came back from Cambridge, and offered some very useful advice on what we should try on ENVI in order to extract more data from the sticker. He showed us how to blur one image, then divide the original by it. There were some very promising results! The text became much more clear. I now posses much more hope for the future of this document.

Mosaicking is moving as slow as ever, especially considering the fact that I stopped half-way through to work on the corvette sticker. The mosaick is progressing, each time I do it now it becomes more seamless and consistent.
 at I am really excited now for what I can get done with image processing. Tomorrow, I hope to get the mosaick done, or at least close to being done!

Day 17

Today I fixed the issue we were having with stitch together the two mosaicks for the palimpsest. All I had to do was crop out the portion with the black lines. What was causing our issues was the method in which ENVI Classic was saving the mosaicks. ENVI apparently does not save tilted images, so it would fill in the empty space around the mosaick to create a square. Therefor, when we overlay one mosaick on top of the other, the black portion which ENVI had filled in to make a perfect rectangle covered up parts of the image.
I was also having issues today with stitching, but for completely different reasons. One image, which I was stitching to the other, was stretched to a different range. This resulted in the mosaick having half be completely black. To remedy this, I had to load in different images which all were stretched to the same range.
Tomorrow, we are looking more into what methods we can use to possibly pull more information from the corvette sticker.

Day 16

Today I succeeded in nothing. I, again, spent a majority of the day image processing and attempting to mosaick. The issues we are having with mosaicking come from the second round of stitching. We can mosaick two images together no problem, but when we try to then stitch that mosaick to a second mosaic, a huge black line is in the center of the image - which, needless to say, is quite counter-productive when considering the whole point of mosaicking is to have one, seamless image. I have practically nothing to show for today except hours of Envi that resulted in no usable mosaicks. Hopefully on Monday, I can come in here with more motivation to stitch the palimpsest together, because as of today I have lost my patience with it. I believe the issue can be resolved with cropping, but that line of thought will have to wait until after the weekend.

Day 15

Day 15!

Today I worked more on using ENVI to analyze the Italian Palimpsest. I spent most of the day on it, and my time yielded more  results  than yesterday. I actually got the writing from underneath to become more legible! It is not ideal yet, but I hope that with more work I can pull the writing from underneath almost entirely, on the entire mosaicked palimpsest from Hudson.
I still cannot understand fourteenth century Italian, but I can recognize some letters! We are starting to think that the way we are analyzing it (shown to the right) is actually situated upside down.  This theory is due to the fact that there are clear accents depicted, which should be above the letters, yet are beneath them in the way we have been processing the palimpsest.
Hudson and I started to work on the outline to our presentation today, which is due on Monday. We plan to improve it tomorrow, as we get more of an idea as to what the rest of the summer entails. It is hard to believe that we are already half way through the internship!