Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland

As you might have seen in Steve's Blog, we ended up getting stranded in Milwaukee overnight and missed most of the keynotes. 

We did manage to catch the last one which was on a company called Element CXI's very interesting reconfigurable hardware model. It basically consists of a mesh of different specifically tasked sub processors which are designed in such a way as to allow processes to be mapped onto sections of the mesh. This created a very parallel and very power efficient design. Although, it seemed as though abstract algorithmic programming for this model is still very difficult as the platform is immature.

As Steve mentioned, there was a lot of talk on hidden watermarking for image and video ownership authentication. One of the techniques we saw based on stable feature points allowed the watermark to be extracted even after the image had various linear transforms applied to it. It was resistant to cropping, skewing, and rotation. It was also interesting to see how a hidden bar code watermark can be applied by removing unimportant curvelet (which is, pretty much, a local wavelet) coefficients and in so doing create computationally (but not visually) detectable voids.

Today there has been much about image and region classification. One presentation was based on segmentation and classification of document regions using an entropy based model. However, the presenter did not provide any comparison of how well this works when compared with more traditional techniques and so it's hard to see what the advantage is.

That's about it for now. There should be more on document processing later today.