Weekly Journal

WEEK 1

May 28, 2012-June 1, 2012

This week was my first week here at Clemson University in South Carolina. I was welcomed with open arms by my advisor for the summer, Dr. Damon Woodard, as well as the Ph.D. students in the Biometrics lab that I will be working in. There are no other DREU or REU students in this lab, however, there is a group of REU students in Dr. Juan Gilbert's Human-Centered Computing lab right down the hall. We all had a chance to meet each other during a brief meeting on Wednesday. Things are going good so far. My housing arrangements worked out great. They have a great transportation service here at Clemson, but I brought my car here as well. I feel very comfortable where I am placed and the Biometrics research that I will be doing seems very interesting. The students that are currently in the lab are already working on facial recognition research, focusing on the periocular region of the face. I will soon be beginning research on methods of identification and identity verification through ear recognition. The main thing that I hope to gain from this experience is a taste of what grad school will be like for me if I choose to attend after I graduate next May.


WEEK 2

June 4, 2012-June 8, 2012

This week has been very successful because I was able to obtain a clear perspective of what I will be spending my time doing this summer. My mentor, Dr. Woodard is very open to meeting with me and answering any and all questions that I have. He gave me a couple different papers and materials to read so that I can become more knowledgeable about the topic of Biometrics. I also found a couple things to read for the research of my own that I will soon be beginning in the area of Ear Recognition. I am trying to think of a good topic for this study but I am sure I will think of one as I continue to read more about it. I attend the lab's weekly meetings every Tuesday where we discuss certain deadlines that must be met and our progress on the current project(s). Basically, this week has been spent learning about Biometrics, assisting with the lab's ongoing Periocular experiments, and working on my website. Speaking of my website, I started it on Google Sites and then decided that I wanted to code it in html from scratch in notepad. I now have two similar websites and I submitted the Google Sites website URL for DREU Admin. approval, however, I prefer to submit the one coded in notepad as my final website submission later on down the line. To do this I am not sure if I would just submit the files alone or if I will have to obtain a domain name and go through a web hosting service. I am excited about what next week will bring.


WEEK 3

June 11, 2012-June 15, 2012

My 3rd week was spent assisting with the periocular (region around the eye) feature vector extraction of a database of different faces better known as "point-clicking". Since the report of this research has a rapidly approaching deadline, I ended up pulling a semi-all-nighter on Wednesday to make sure my portion of the point-clicking was finished in enough time for the Ph.D. students to run their experiments. Once that was finished, the rest of my week was spent learning Matlab, which is used to implement numerical algorithms for a wide range of applications. I did a few tutorials, which were very helpful. I have also been reading more into Ear Biometrics, learning about the different approaches that exist as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Despite the fact that I am the only REU student in the lab that I am in, I have had a chance to hang out with the other REU students at Clemson on several occasions.


WEEK 4

June 18, 2012-June 22, 2012

This week, I was given instruction from my advisor to search for an implementation of an ear recognition system, since that is the area of Biometrics that I have chosen to focus on for the summer. Since this will be an upcoming new topic and project for the lab, I will be doing a lot of reading up on the current strategies for ear recognition that are already in place and looking for ways to improve them. After some good Google searching, I was able to find a pretty good example, coded in MatLab. The ReadMe instructions were very helpful as to how to use the program so I spent more time trying to get a better understanding of the actual code and how it works and I also went through some more MatLab tutorials to get myself more comfortable with it. I am in the process of looking for another good MatLab example as well as one in Java, since that is the language that I am currently most comfortable with, or a C-like language, because that is the commonly-used language of the lab, although I am pretty sure that the MatLab example will be the easiest to understand.


WEEK 5

June 25, 2012-June 29, 2012

Week five was spent continuing research of the ear, reading more materials, and overviewing the ear recognition implementation in Matlab. The example allows images to be added to a database, organized into classes. In order to perform ear recognition, the database has to include at least one image. I attempted to use a few images of ears I obtained from Google. The issue with this was that with the program, the images have to be the same size. Using this program will be a bit easier once I receive access to the ear database. In the meantime, I was able to spend more time with the other REU students this week. We are also planning a weekend trip to Carowinds amusement in a few weeks. While working on my progress report, I realized how time is really winding down.


WEEK 6

July 2, 2012-July 6, 2012

This week it was brought to my attention that I had access to a couple of ear databases all along. The galleries included multiple photos of side profiles of different subjects' ears and the area around their ears. However, for the experiments that I am trying to run, I need the photos to be of the ear only and they must all be the same size. My advisor supplied me with a MatLab User's Guide specifically for Image Processing which will help me learn the different tools for analyzing and measuring features in an image and resizing them. I still spent time trying to figure out a way to crop them after I selected the smaller sample of images that I would be working with. This week was also spent searching for a second implementation of ear recognition in Matlab, unfortunately, I had no luck in this area. This search will continue, but if I am not able to find another one soon then I will be creating a simple implementation with a global approach which will simply compare two images as a whole.


WEEK 7

July 9, 2012-July 13, 2012

Since a lot of time was spent trying to figure out how to process the images, I was instructed to spend a good amount of time searching for a pre-processed ear image database. After a couple days of searching, I was able to find one that could be used; it has about 100 total images of 17 different subjects with all images already cropped to show only the ear. At that point, all I needed to do was resize the images, which I had already found the command to do so with Matlab inside of the Image Processing book that I was previously reading. I began trying to test the program by adding a few images from the gallery to the program database. I then attempted to perform ear recognition between two of the images that I added, however, I came across an error that I did not recognize since I am still fairly unfamiliar with Matlab. I researched the error but concluded that it could have something to do with the images' type so I began saving them in a different format in order to attempt to test them again.


WEEK 8

July 16, 2012-July 20, 2012

This week I worked on the PowerPoint presentation that I will be doing for the other REU students and professors in Clemson's Human-Centered Computing Division during my last week here. In our weekly meeting this Wednesday, my advisor and I went over the outline that I prepared for the presentation. He gave me suggestions for improvement and I then came up with a rough draft presentation. I did a lot more reading so that I can be very familiar and comfortable with everything that I speak about during my presentation. Due to the fact that most of the people that I will be presenting to will not be very acquainted with the topic of Biometrics, I had to simplify the terms in the presentation so that it could be more easily understood. I will be practicing it for everybody in my lab during our next meeting on Tuesday. Since they are much more accustomed to everything that I will be speaking about, the PhD students will be able to give me good feedback.


WEEK 9

July 23, 2012-July 27, 2012

In our Monday meeting, my advisor gave me a small quiz on the information that I was going to be presenting to the lab the next day. My answers were a little fuzzy for a few of the questions that he asked but I spent the whole day after the meeting reading and refreshing my mind on concepts that I learned when I began my DREU. This helped to better prepare me for my trial run. Once I basically finished my PowerPoint presentation and had rehearsed it for the lab, I made the corrections, additions, and deletions that were recommended and I was able to focus more on my final paper. The hardest part was deciding what direction I wanted to take the paper, but I decided to direct it more toward being informative about ear biometrics as a whole, while zoning in on what I learned and what could be done in the future in this area, if I were to attend Clemson for graduate school. I also talked about why I prefer red working in this specific area with this advisor.


WEEK 10

July 30, 2012-August 3, 2012

This is my last week here at Clemson. Wow, time has really flown! I started the week out working on my presentation for Tuesday, gaining more helpful tips and suggestions from my advisor and lab mates. My presentation went good! Once that was over, I had more time to put my concentration into my final paper and my website. I did not have a chance to make my website as glamorous as I would've liked to but it includes all of the necessary things. This summer went by so fast. I had a great experience in my lab and at Clemson as a whole. I am sad to have to say "Goodbye".