Akhil

A: An introduction

• Please describe yourself in three sentences, one of them regarding your current studies.

I am a current Masters student at IIIT-Hyderabad, India. I am doing my thesis in the area of biometrics and fingerprint recognition.

• • Which languages do you speak?

I am comfortable with English, Hindi.

• • What's your overall background?

Doing masters in Computer Science.

• Why do you want to participate in the Google Summer of Code? What do you hope to gain by doing so?

I have already worked previously with debian in GSOC and enjoyed every part of it. I have done a lot of my thesis work via m-scripting in octave and would like to give back to the community now.

• • Please also describe your previous experience with the GSoC, if any.

Participated with Debian organization in GSOC and enjoyed it.

• Why are you choosing Octave?

As said, I have done a lot of my thesis work on Octave. I also went through a page where I got to know about the people that use octave. Octave has a huge and varied user base. It would be pleasure to see my code being used by them to solve their problems. Thats what I did..I used somebody else's octave functions in my thesis work :)

C: Contact

• Please state the (unique and identical where possible) nick you use on IRC and any other communication channel related to Octave. We really want unique nicks. You might want to bold it.
• Which time zone do you live in? Will that change over GSoC duration? Perhaps DST adjustment or a relocation. Note that both UTC and GMT are not aware of daylight saving time! Please state UTC+x or -x.
• Please state the timeframe (in UTC+0) when you feel most comfortable working during GSoC. Where are your time buffers? Example: I usually code around 9.00 to 18.00 and could also try to start earlier (~7.00) for few days ;-)

E: Coding experience

Have a lot of experience with working with octave and matlab. Have in-depth knowledge of python and C++.

F: Feeling fine

Usually hangout at Octave Irc (nick-fedex). I have knowledge of git and currently understanding mercurial. It is not much of a problem as I think both are based on same principles.

O: Only out of interest

I first used octave while doing some matrix-related assignment in my linear-algebra course. Basically, my professor introduced me to Octave and since, then I have been using it continuously.

P: Prerequisites

I work with Ubuntu 12.04.

• Please estimate an average time per day you will be able to (if separated) access
  • an internet connection --- 24 hr internet at college :)
  • a computer --- 24 hrs
  • a computer with your progressing work on --- 24 hr
• Please describe the degree up to which you can install new software on computers you have access to.

I have worked a lot on lot of OSs, so I don't think this should be a problem.

S: Self-assessment

• Please describe how useful criticism looks from your point of view as committing student.

Criticism is very important because thats when you know you are going wrong and need to do something different.

• How autonomous are you when developing?

Not that much

• • Do you like to discuss changes intensively and not start coding until you know what you want to do?

Yes, I must have a solid plan before I start coding. Ofcourse, I go through many plans in the planning phase to come up with that solid plan.

• • Do you like to code a proof of concept to 'see how it turns out', modifying that and taking the risk of having work thrown away if it doesn't match what the project or original proponent had in mind?

Although I don't like it but that happens and you need to accept it.

Y: Your task

• Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas?

Yes

• • If yes, what task did you choose? Please describe what part of it you especially want to focus on if you can already provide this information.

I chose Improvements to N-dimensional image processing project from the ideas page. Mainly, I wish to focus on important image processing functions in the image package of octave source forge.

• Please provide a rough estimated timeline for your work on the task. This should include the GSoC midterms and personal commitments like exams or vacation ("non-coding time"). Optionally include two or three milestones you expect.

No personal commitments, so I can easily give 35+ hrs per week to GSoC :)

I have divided this project into 4 main phases .

Phase 1 : This phase would involve patching simple statistics functions like imhist, entropy, mean2, std2 and entropyfilt. This phase will be from 5th May to 20th May. This is just some qualification tasks so that the mentor can judge my aptitude and skills.

Phase 2 : This phase will be the community bonding period. In this phase, I will discuss with mentor and come up with an exhaustive list of image processing functions that we believe should have multi-dimensional image handling support. This phase will last from 27th May to June 16th.

Phase 3 : This phase will be the begining of real coding phase. The target here will be to patch the following black and white image processing functions : bwconncomp, bwdist, bweuler, bwfill and other functions that will come up in the discussions of phase2.

This phase will last from June 17 to July 29th. At the end of this period and at the time of mid-term, atleast all the bw image processing functions should be properly patched and tested with multidimensional images.

Phase 4 : The final phase would last from Aug 2 to Sep 16. In this phase , I would mostly be dealing with image enhancement and restoration functions like imadjust, imfilter , imsmooth and other functions as discussed with the mentor in phase 2.