NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)
Summer 2007 - Computer Vision and Image Processing
Department of Computer Science, Utah State University

  Name:

  Jacob Linenthal

  Major:

  Mathematics and Computer Science

  School:

  University of Puget Sound

  Home Town:

  Bloomington, Indiana

About Me

Hi: I'm Jake, and I study math and computer science at the University of Puget Sound, a small liberal arts school in Tacoma, WA. I came to this program to get a taste of graduate school, as well as to explore areas of computer science which I did not have much experience in. While I likely will not specialize in computer vision or image processing in graduate school, I'm glad to have had this opportunity -- there are many interesting and hard problems in these areas.

I would not say that Logan is a particularly "fun" place. However, it is peaceful and incredibly pretty. There are great hiking trails as well as a lot of other opportunities for outdoor activities -- I was happy to find regular games of Ultimate Frisbee 4 times a week. My fellow REUers were a fun group; we had some interesting adventures, including a whitewater rafting trip on the Snake River. A word to the wise: stay out of the parks at night.

Project

I worked this summer on developing a Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system. The idea of CBIR is for a user to be able to search a database for images which are somehow related to a given query image. This is made difficult by the fact that computers have trouble interpreting the semantic content of an image. I worked to improve methods of learning the semantic relationships between images in the database by analyzing the user's relevance feedback, concentrating particularly on finding methods for reducing the effect of noise (incorrectly classified images) on the retrieval results.

Results

Experiments showed that our improvements were effective. For details, see my final presentation or final paper.

If you have any questions, feel free to write me at: