What next?

HGFei is leaving Austria in summer 2007 to go to Australia until Christmas 2007. I’d have to have my thesis finished by the end of June 2007. He asked me to give a schedule to be able to finish it by the end of the current term. Of course, regarding my scholarship, I should have finished it by July 2007 anyway. But I currently don’t know what the schedule could look like. I don’t know what my thesis could or should look like in the end, and therefore I don’t know what path to take to go there, and therefore I don’t really know my next steps. He said I shouldn’t be too ambitious and should produce a spate of demos now. But I don’t actually know what these should demonstrate. Maybe that kind of panic is somehow natural, but I’m not comfortable with that. Sure, I have time now for doing my thesis, and I really have to make use of it. I still have plenty of literature to read.

What I had done in February was starting to write the introductory chapter with LaTeX. That was a step what had to be done anyway, I can concentrate mostly on the content now. I wrote some pages about the foundations of TF-analysis, including some more side notes that are usually not mentioned in the other Master’s theses at my institute. As one of the next things I want to get familiar with the computing language of MATLAB/Octave. During the last days I did some experiments with FFT2, and I might write down some results here in the blog. Now I know how to do different things in Octave, I produced some pictures and rendered them to videos. This might provide some munition for doing 2D-Gabor Analysis.

Now I should look how to finally do image processing using Gabor Analysis methods. In our last conversation at the end of December 2006, HGFei told me some results on how to use the 1D-algorithms for higher dimensions, because their tools actually only provide algorithms for 1D-signals. I’d be the first to actually use that in the 2D-case. To understand how this is obtained I’d have to be familiar with the basics of GA on groups—a rather abstract approach. And mapping 1D to 2D implies that I can do it in the 1D case also. At least, if I can’t provide a schedule and don’t know how to be done by the end of this term, I know what my next steps are.

He also mentioned that I simply should do some basic experminents such as thresholding, i.e., doing reconstructions by leaving out coefficients with low contribution; this is a leering to the task of image compression.

Tomorrow, the summer term is starting, and I’ll attend HGFei’s project seminar on numerical harmonic analysis, where we’ll have to approach different problems using MATLAB.