International Trip to Ancient Mayan and Crusader Sites Recognized by the College

A recent postcard distributed to college alumni and friends of the William States Lee College of Engineering features the work accomplished in the 2007 data collection trips to Mayan and Crusader sites.

The article provides a high-level summary of ongoing research in the laboratory exploring ways which current technologies, specifically 3D laser measurement devices, can contribute to solving difficult problems in anthropology and archaeology. 

These trips concentrated on investigating uses of 3D LIDAR (LIght Distance And Ranging) for use in archaeological and anthropological field environments. A custom-built laser was developed at the laboratory which performed well given the difficult and demanding conditions associated with field archaeology. 

See the PDF of the article by clicking on the image.

Lab Student Yunfeng Sui Receives Blue Diamond Award

The Blue Diamond Awards were created in 1988 to recognize technology-based contributions made by Charlotte-area companies and individuals. The awards are sponsored by IT Charlotte, part of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

On March 27th 2006, 19th annual Blue Diamond Awards was announced and our resident Ph.D. student, Yunfeng Sui, was the winner of the Joanna R. Baker Memorial Graduate Fellowship. This fellowship program  was established by Dr. Baker to recognize and continue her extraordinary vision of interdisciplinary research and the application of information technology to problem solving in the public sector. Each year during the spring semester, the Graduate School, in conjunction with the Joanna R. Baker Foundation, awards this prize to a graduate student who has a commitment to a career that will apply information technology to problem solving in the public sector.

Yunfeng was awarded for his contribution in 2D and 3D image processing. One of his past research topics in 2D image processing was to improve a system that automatically classifies agricultural seeds from digital images of the seeds. His current research is on 3D surface processing for archaeology. Here he seeks to build 3D virtual objects from 3D laser-scan measurements of the real word objects. By processing these models, structures of interest may be extracted from the measured data that address problems such as (1) re-assembling large broken objects (bridges, walls, buildings) in a virtual environment from models of their fragments and (2) recognition of scene objects given measurements of the global scene.

 Congratulations to Yunfeng for receiving this honor which includes a $2,000 scholarship!

Experimental Low-Cost LIDAR Scanner Implementation Complete 

The UNCC Machine Vision lab has acquired an AR4000 range sensor from Acuity Laser Measurement the system is capable of capturing 3D surface range data up to 40 feet from the sensor.

We have recently develop a linux driver for this sensor. The source for this driver is available through subversion at the subversion repository here under the link "laser-driver." The linux driver is currently compatible with linux kernel versions 2.6.16-2.8.18.

Small Code Footprint DICOM Image Loader Completed 

Recent work involving medical images have motivated the implementation of a robust DICOM image reader. This work has now been completed resulting in one of the most complete open-source Java implementations of the DICOM specification. The implementation is capable of loading 8-bit grayscale, 8-bit color, 16-bit grayscale, and 24-bit color DICOM images where the image data may be uncompressed, run-length encoded, jpeg-lossless compressed, or jpeg-lossy compressed. Also of interest is the implementation of the spatial (sequential) lossless encoding mode (SOF3) of the ISO/IEC also known as JPEGL. Note that this IS NOT an implementation of JPEG-LS. It is an implementation of the original lossless JPEG coding scheme as specified in the ORIGINAL JPEG Internal Standards Organization (ISO) spec :

• ISO/IS-10918-1 (JPEG Part 1)
• ISO/IS-10918-2 (JPEG Part 2)

Whereas JPEG-LS is ISO spec ISO/IS-14495-1 (JPEG-LS Part 1).

I can find no easy-to-use, small-footprint, open-source Java implementation capable of decoding these streams at full resolution. Some nice things about the implementation is that it requires just a few new classes to run (approximately 6).

Laboratory Acquires new Vivid 910 Non-Contact Digitizer 

 Recently the visionlab has been able to acquire a new piece of lab equipment : a Vivid 910 3D digitizer manufactured by Konica Minolta. This should be a great tool for research and education. Interested readers may read on to know more about this equipment.....

• Speed - scans in less than one second (Fast Mode)
• Precision - over 300,000 points with range resolution to 0.0016" (Fine Mode)
• Simplicity - point and shoot simplicity for consistently excellent results
• Flexibility - only Konica Minolta offers interchangeable lenses for variable scanning volumes