After a short break

On the train on the way back from a weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon and decided I have been remiss in neglecting my blog for so long. I often get overwhelmed by the pace of life in London and things like blogging seem to quickly drop of the list of priorities, however the other day while reading back over some of my past entries I realised that it is an important record for me as well as a way of keeping in contact with distant friends and family.

Anthea and I have certainly been very busy this year, and when I reflect back on what we have done this year I realise it has probably been the most social year of our lives, combined with the most travelling we have ever done - and for me at least - one of the most challenging working years of my career. I am very proud of what we have achieved this year and although I am very tired and desperately looking forward to our Christmas break I wouldn't have had it any other way. My goal now is to try and figure out how to fit more into next year!

I have been neglecting my vision project over the last few months. Making small progress by picking at it whenever I've had some spare time. What hasn't helped is that a couple of months ago I decided to build a Mythtv box to record the hockey (since most of it is screened in the middle of the night). This has turned out to be a far far more challenging task than I anticipated and has consequently stolen time from my other projects. The good news is that the end is finally in sight and I will hopefully have a stable system running in the next week or two.

I have spent some of this weekend reading the chapter on Structure Computation in my computer vision text. Essentially working out how to reconstruct a 3D scene from stereoscopic information. I think I understood most of it on first reading - which testifies to the fact that a lot of the revision work I have been doing on linear algebra has paid off. My plan is to implement a naive algorthim first, and once that is working refine it with an optimal (and much more challenging) solution. It is still my hope that once I have the reconstruction phase working the rest of the project will progress along very quickly. I am still amazed at how difficult the elementary concepts of computer vision are. I really had no idea of what I was getting myself into when I started this project.