Last week (on Friday) we held the Aberystwyth Image Analysis workshop. I think it was the 3rd, or maybe the 4th one of these I’ve organised. The aim is to have some informal talks and posters centred around the theme of image analysis (including image processing, computer vision, and other image-related stuff) from across Aberystwyth. To encourage participation from people whether they’ve got results or not we have 10 minute slots for problem statements, short talks, work in progress and so on, and we have 20 minute slots for longer pieces of work. This year there were 4 departments represented in talks: Computer science, Maths, Physics and IBERS (biology), and we had speakers who were PhD students, post docs, lecturers and senior lecturers (no profs this year, boo!).
The range of topics covered was as usual very broad – images are used in research all the time, and it’s really useful to get together and see the kinds of techniques people are using. In Physics, they’re working on tightly and precisely calibrated cameras and instruments, using images as a form of measurement. In Maths the images are fitted to models and used to test theories about (for example) foam. In computer science people are working on cancer research using images, plant and crop growth modelling, and video summarisation (to name but a few of the topics). And the IBERS talk this year came from Lizzy Donkin, a PhD student who’s working on slugs.
Lizzy and I have been trying to track slugs so that she can model how they forage – she spoke for 10 minutes on the problem of slugs and imagery, and I spoke for 10 minutes on preliminary slug tracking results. Here’s a screenshot of my favourite slide, showing the wide range of shape deformations that a single slug can undergo.
