Project Description
Pattern recognition is an old endeavor in plant ecology. For example, in her book Mathematical Ecology (1977) Chris Pielou asked Are zone boundaries grouped, or even spaced out? Do the zones tend to abut on neighboring zones with little or no overlap, or do they overlap extensively? These questions stem from the Ph.D. thesis of Braun-Blanquet (1913) researching the vegetation close to glaciers in the alps.
With the advent of personal computers and computers in general, pattern recognition has advanced from these earlier days and become a topic where commercial and industrial entities are the driving forces for progress. In biological oceanography and limnology, due to the need of tediously analyzing plankton samples, pattern recognition became a main topic in instrument developments. Automatic enumeration of animals and algae using scanned pictures of the samples with some high accuracy is now a standard way of work. Additionally, recognition of hand-written text, e.g. dollar amounts on checks, pushes the development of modern mathematical tools.
Tasks and Responsibilites
The mentor, Prof. Hinow, has a long history of interdisciplinary collaboration with Prof. J. R. Strickler in the Department of Biological Sciences. There exist high-speed video observations of animal and algae patches during predator-prey interactions and of coagulation in watery mixtures with thousands of frames during fast changes of distribution patterns. These necessitate an automatic evaluation process. The objective of the proposed work is to figure out algorithms that allow near-real time evaluations.
The student will delve into the field of deep learning to figure out a way to categorize a stack of pictures into at least two types in terms of different over-all character of each picture. The end goal is to have a flow-through (e.g., on-line video camera) of binary (just black and white) pictures evaluated and have noted when the character of the pictures changes due to some outside influence.
Desired Qualifications
None listed