An interactive image processing course
Three versions of the WWW course can be visited:
The pages below describe the ongoing work in the Pattern Recognition Group
at the Department of Applied Physics
of the Delft University of Technology
in Delft,
The Netherlands
to
create an interactive image processing course on the World Wide Web.
HP Image Systems Engineering Initiative
Background
This project is performed on initiative of the Hewlett & Packard Corporation.
Below, a short background of the total ISE project is given,
followed by an overview of the project at Delft.
In mid 1995 the Hewlett and Packard Company
launched the Image Systems Engineering Initiative within the HP
Philantrophy Program. The objective of this HP Instructional Grants
Program is to encourage universities which are actively teaching digital
image systems engineering, to further develop their curriculum in this
field. HP aimed at courses at the upper division undergraduate and introductory
graduate level.
The reason HP launched this initiative was the fact that HP envisions
that digital image processing in many aspects will become increasingly
important to the citizens of the world. We are on the transition of a world
characterized by analog, black and white, office centered, stand-alone,
passive hard imaging, to a world that is characterized by digital, colored,
home-centered, communicative, interactive imaging, maybe in 3D virtual
or augmented reality worlds.
The universities will play a central role in leading the digital image
revolution, both in research they advance and in the students they teach.
HP expects that image systems engineering will emerge as a significant
field of the engineering curriculum. HP's ISE initiative was set-up to
encourage young people to move into the field of engineering and specifically
into the field of Imaging Engineering.
See also the proceedings of the ICIP-96 (IEEE International Conference
on Image Processing 1996, 16-19 September, Lausanne, Switzerland), volume
1, track 16P1:
Curriculum advances in digital systems engineering, pp. 431-460:
-
Daniel Lee, New Opportunities in Digital Imaging Systems
-
Joseph Goodman, Brian Wandell, Image systems engineering at Stanford
-
Touradj Ebrahimi, Murat Kunt, Advanced image systems curricula at EPFL
-
Ronald Schafer et. al., Education in (and by) digital image systems
at Georgia Tech
-
Michael Lindenbaum, Y.Y. Zeevi, Education in image sciences and engineering
at the Technion
-
J.P. Allebach at al, Video and image systems engineering education for
the 21st century
-
V. Cantoni et. al., A training environment for ISE courses
-
Ramesh Jain, Pamela Cosman, Visual computing education at UCSD
European partners
The current European partners in the HP-ISE initiative are:
The aim: Towards a worldwide curriculum
The ISE partners aim at collaborating in the development of a worldwide
curriculum in Image Systems Engineering. The starting points are:
ISE Applications and Industrial Market
-
The Machine Vision based Industrial Inspection Market is estimated to be
approx. 5 Billion US$ large.
-
The Medical Inspection Equipment market: (p.m.)
-
The Penetration of video games in the US households will grow to about
50% in the year 2000
-
The Tele-Communication Market (p.m.)
ISE Job Market
-
The job market in 1997 and 1998 is extremely good in the Netherlands.
Universities have an extreme shortage in PhD candidates. The job market
is currently dominated by the software industry and banking business. The
booming of World Wide Web, Tele-banking, the introduction of the Euro and
the salvage of the Millennium problem are all factors that play a role in
this.
ISE Courses
ISE Student Output
-
In the years 1992 to 1998, 85 students of the Pattern
Recognition Group obtained their Engineers (Ir.) degree (i.e. Msc in
Engineering) and 15 students obtained their Dr. degree (Ph.D.) . They all
found their way to science and industry.
ISE Curriculum Funding
ISE Teamwork
We favor regular meetings between the ISE partners. The initial meeting
at the ICIP in Lausanne (Sept' 96) was fruitful. In many universities,
travel fees to conferences are connected to the publication of a paper.
A fixed connection between ISE and ICIP without additional funding may
prohibit partners to visit other conferences, due to time and money restrictions.
In order for the ISE Initiative to be successful, additional travel funding
must be found, either from the HP Philantrophy program, or from source like
Esprit's
network's of excellence. (Link to next meeting in Bristol)
The HP-ISE Project in Delft
Design criteria
Our interest in the context of the ISE program is to present to persons,
educated on a level between undergraduate and graduate, who do not have
knowledge of image processing, an introductory course in image processing
on the World Wide Web. In the tradition of our Industrial
Course on Image Processing, we will focus on a high "hands-on experience"
component. We try to realise this by allowing the student to run demonstrations
of operations and to experiment with operations and series of operations
on a variety of images, possibly his own. Consequently, the goal of the
TUD part of the Engineering Systems Initiative is to construct an interactive
document dedicated to teaching image processing basics. We aim at an interactive
tutorial with the following properties:
| Wide availability: |
It should be very easy for people worldwide to work with
the material. |
| Portability: |
For the target audience to be as potentially wide as possible,
the implementation should not be architecture-dependent. |
| Modularity: |
The user should be able to enter the tutorial at his or
her own level of expertise. |
| Interactivity: |
The user should be able to experiment directly with the
presented material. |
| Testing: |
Problems should be available for the user to assess his
or her knowledge. |
| A standard interface: |
A clear and easy-to-understand interface, in which all possibilities
are uniformly presented. |
| Maintainability: |
It should be easy for new sections or modules to be added
to the base set of documents. |
All these requirements made us believe that a HTML representation is the
best choice. In a later stage to be augmented by a Java implementation.
Implementation
We started with an implementation of a course, based on the book `Fundamentals
of image processing' (Young, Gerbrands, Van Vliet). A global setup is shown
below.
We present the material in a hierarchical, walk-through way, like in
a course book. Besides the basic material, a kind of encyclopedia would
serve as a reference manual. Preferably these two representations are based
on the same source. Apart from these two textual representations, demonstrations
and labwork based on images provided by the course or the user, a glossary
and a reference list were found to be necessary, all connected through
appropriate hyperlinks.
Progress
Within the context of the original 1995 grant we planned to treat the topics
of:
-
Set up the HMTL web course
-
Set up the demonstrators
-
Set up interactive student tests
-
Set up a glossary and reference system
To date the HTML course is on the net, and work is still in progress to
set-up suitable demonstrators and tests for students. The pain here is
not so much in the technical possibility to incorporate demo's and tests
into the course, but rather the decisions what to incorporate and how to
implement it, so that it makes sense within the context of the course.
The work on the glossary and reference system is still ongoing. A remaining
problem, the fact that the formula's did not not resize, was solved.
Within the context of the 1997 grant update we planned to treat the
topics of:
-
Interactive internet imaging using CGI-Bin and Java,
-
Fast Image manipulation by looking at parallel implementations
-
Introduction of colour science in the course
Our goal within the 1997 project update was to implement all demonstrations
and tests in Java, since this would truly make the course portable and
less dependent on (slow) Internet connections, while relieving our computers
of unnecessary work. A Java implementation may however take considerable
time, since all the basics (image handling/transmitting/storage etc.) has
to be written in advance. For prototyping purposes, we therefore made a
SCIL-Image / WWW interface through CGI-BIN scripts. Note that the image
processing package SCIL-Image
with its extensive library is a commercial package developed within the
context of the Dutch Center for Image Processing and Pattern Recognition
(CBP). Permission was granted from the source owner, the Institute
of Applied Physics to partly put the package on the net.
To date we work with a CGI-BIN version of the course (not yet released
on the net), that is capable to perform demo's and tests. However, the
implementation of demo's and tests takes considerably more time than estimated.
Reason why the introduction of colour science was postponed.
Finally we planned to analyse our system (course_server <-> network
<-> student_client) on processing speed and interaction speed. We looked
at a parallel implementation of the system, and did some tests on coupling
Scil-Image onto a parallel system, while distributing the Image Processing
Tasks. However, the current OS version of the server was not capable to
use multi-threading over processors. The OS needs to be updated for that.
Moreover, we analysed the network and concluded that parallel implementations
did not make sense as long as the network remained slow. We had been able,
when the HP-J29080A AdvancedStack LAN-switch arrived, to couple the network
connection of the course-server with a 100 Mbit/sec link to the University
and Dutch ATM network.
The Java implementation was postponed until insight is obtained in
the performance of the CGI-BIN version.
Planning
| Due |
Item |
Status |
| 01-04-1997 |
Set up the HTML web course |
ready |
| 01-06-1997 |
Coupling with demonstrators and tests |
ongoing |
| 01-07-1997 |
Finalising the glossary and reference system |
ongoing |
| 01-10-1997 |
Making SCIL-Image available on the WWW using cgi-bin |
ready |
| 01-12-1997 |
Java implementation of the courseware |
to be started |
| 01-04-1998 |
Speed up the course server |
ongoing |
Infrastructure
-
Course (Web) Server:
-
HP J200, dual processor, 512MB, Visualize-24 CG system, HP A4049 camera,
HP A4248A Video-recorder I/O module
-
J29080A AdvancedStack LAN switch, with 100VGAnyLan and 100Tbase network
ports connected to the University and Dutch 155 Mbit/sec ATM network.
-
Local Unix based Course-Clients:
-
HP 715/100 Graphics workstation, Visualize-24 CG system
-
2 HP C3253A X-Terminals
-
Local PC-NT based Course-Clients:
-
2 HP Vectra XU dual Pentium PC's, C2527B Scanjet 4c color scanner, C3198A
Inkjet A0 Plotter Mod 755CM, C3962A Color LaserJet 5M
Personel
The participants involved in the realisation of the project are:
Proposal for the 1998 project update
Project title: Ubiquitous Learning
Distant learning on any place in the world through the world wide web.
Background:
The background for this project update is described above in the sections
on " The HP-ISE project at Delft ", and in the web
pages of the Ubiquitous Communication
project.
Summary:
Within the coming years, the use of the World Wide Web will become more
and more intensive, while the number of applications will be growing. This
will put a pressure onto the number of points where the net can be entered.
Also a remarkable explosive growth can be seen in the field of mobile (GSM)
telephone systems, coupled with lap and palmtop computers.
Within the TU-Delft an initiative was taken for a project on Ubiquitous
Communication, the focus of which is on hands-free visual communication
with agreed measures of reliability, quality, synchronization and real-time
performance. This focus differs from the concepts of current autonomous
wireless networks and mobile terminal networks. It has several challenging
implications such as: The processing and displaying of moving pictures
in a light-weight, low-power, head-up transceiver with see through display.
The communication through high frequency, bi-directional, wideband, multiple
access links. The emulation and performance analysis of the overall communication
system. And last but not least, the compression and manipulation of virtual
reality and real-life image sequences in such a way that the real world
is augmented with virtual images in perfect overlay.
The assessment of the concept's feasibility is through the realisation
of an example: A visual geographic information system in an educational
setting. I.e., a number of users, professor and students in
an architecture course, could discuss the architecture of a virtual building
in an existing world, each one viewing it from different viewpoints in
augmented reality.
More simple examples would be the possibility to follow courses in
e.g. Image Processing from any place on the campus, to follow and diagnose
a medical surgery from a distance, or to follow a guided tour through a
museum with a UBICOM headset on. In the latter case, apart from signs that
signal the continuation of the tour, texts could be projected on museum
walls that enligthens the background of the piece of art that is viewed.
Activity Description:
Within the context of the HP-ISE project update, we will follow the path
of the aims of the Ubiquitous Communication Project but with an emphasis
on education. We will augment the interactive course with the theory of
the processing of 3D voxel images. In order to interactively visualize
these images, visualisation tools to manipulate these images need to be
incorporated into the courseware, e.g. based on Java tools for 3D
web pages.
In a second stage we will augment the course with theory of affine
transforms and image warping and will elucidate this in the courseware
with the projection of images, e.g. the course text, on a wall in a virtual
world.
Planning:
| Due |
Item |
| 01-10-1998 |
Java Implementation including 3D web tools |
| 01-01-1999 |
3D image processing course ware |
| 01-06-1999 |
Course ware on Affine Transforms and Image Warping |
Participants in the project:
The participants involved in the realisation of the project are:
Publication of results:
The results of the project will be published in proceedings of suitable
conferences on Image Processing (e.g. IEEE
) and Pattern Recognition (e.g. IAPR
) and workshops organized by the HP-ISE
initiative.
This page is maintained by Pieter
Jonker .
