I'm thinnking about applying as a student to implement an image segmentation plugin using the technique known as the Image Foresting Transform (IFT) [4], but before that I'd like to introduce myself and ask a couple of questions to make sure our interests match. So here goes:
= Introduction =
I'm a Computer Science MSc student at UNICAMP (from Brazil, we've a great history of participations on GSoC), and I have been working with Linux for about 4 years. I've just been admitted to the graduate program but I've been researching image processing algorithms (mostly related to object segmentation on images and videos) for the past 2 years. Before that I have worked with robotics, so I have experience on:
* Building C/C++ modules applied to indoor navigation of robots for about 2 years as a Research Scholarship Holder -- This project was also applied to the mix of robotics and entertainment, and involved a lot of C/Shell Script hacking and kernel adaptation (also some Java coding).
* Developing image and video segmentation algorithms [1,2,3] using the Image Foresting Transform (created by my advisor prof. Alexandre X. Falcão [4]) mostly in C/C++ (some Python) -- Also as a Research Scholarship Holder.
* Dealing with libraries such as wxWidgets (Gtk) to implement the GUI of a software used in my image processing research. I am currently doing some code scrubbing on that sw to make it available on the Internet (open source, of course =D).
In fact, the last item is where I got the inspiration to develop the GIMP plugin in the first place. IFT is a great alternative to algorithms based on the graph cut technique, and it was proven to provide better results [5]. It is a generalization of the Dijkstra's algorithm, which works quite fast and has served for many purposes in the image processing domain (e.g. image segmentation, CBIR, and morphology). Furthermore, in my research we have been working really hard to make user interaction more effective, faster, and the least as possible.
That's it for my technical profile. As for my personal info, I'm not sure what to write about, so feel free to ask me any questions.
= Questions =
I know there is already a segmentation tool in GIMP, but I feel it could co-exist with this plugin. So, here are my questions:
* I like to use SSE intrinsics to optimize some of my code, is it ok if I use it for the plugin?
* I do plan to keep working on my research during the GSoC period, which takes me around 25~30 hours each week. Will this be a problem?
That's it guys. Sorry for the long e-mail.
Hope to hear from you.
Best regards,
[1] - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1700473
[2] - http://www.springerlink.com/content/7415482725175nm7/
[3] - R. Minetto, J. P. Papa, T. V. Spina, A. X. Falcão, N. J. Leite, and J. Stolfi. Fast and robust object tracking using iimage foresting transform. In 16th International Workshop on Systems, Signals and Image Processing, Chalkida, Greece, Jun 2009. IEEE.
[4] - http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~afalcao/downloads.html
[5] - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1574529
(Please let me apologize about referencing our papers, but our software is not yet available. If anyone is interested in reading them please contact me.)
--
Thiago Vallin Spina
MSc Student
Laboratory of Visual Informatics
Institute of Computing -- Unicamp
www.liv.ic.unicamp.br/
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