The most beautiful thing in the world, I think, is the ability of the human mind to absorb a lot of content. We are standing on the shores of our little islands facing an infinite sea of possibilities, and it calls us to voyage far. The sciences, each expanding towards new directions have benefited us immensely; yet some day the piecing together of seemingly dissociated knowledge will open up such fantastic vistas of reality, and of our position therein, that we shall either be subdued by the revelation or push on towards the welcoming light, into the excitement and uncertainty of a new golden ageIf the above words sound familiar, it is because it is a revision of the nihilistic opening lines of HP Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu. Unlike the narrator, I am more hopeful and optimistic about man's never ending pursuit of knowledge. We will generate aplenty and it will probably confound us most of the time. Initially, a lot of it may seem disparate or incompatible, but a lot of new discoveries and research are happening on the frontiers of different disciplines: and that is exciting!
In this regard, I am especially intrigued by the things I will be learning and applying from the Advanced Signal and Image Processing course I am taking up this semester. Sure, we have always been processing signals and images. Our online world today is overflowing with signals from various sources, especially from social network feeds. What may have once been the province of computer-folks are now part of many scientists' arsenal. In short, image processing has gone mainstream. As part of the requirements of the course, this blog will be a record of our activities, machine problems, discussions and probably a few digressions.
To end this post, the image below is a result from my earlier local conference paper (2009). I processed the last two images (with the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm) to generate a bitmap used by the SLM (spatial light modulator) to modify the light pattern used in optical lithography.
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