Art Gallery
SVD
Singular value decomposition (SVD) is a method of breaking apart matrices that has many applications in statistics and scientific research. It also happens to pe fairly good as a lossy data compression method.
I've written a little bit about how this process works in a blog post. The first image presented here is what happens when you take one feature from each color channel of an image and pass it back out to an image library. Flip through the images below to see how quickly objects in the image start to take shape!
My original experiment was 100 features. Already at this scale, there's very little data missing that would lead people to believe this wasn't the original image. The approximate SVD for the image above using 128 features for each color channel is still only 12% the data size of the original pixel information.
Photography
Since I spend most of my days in front of a computer, I photograph organic things when I get the opportunity. Wild animals and insects challenge both my accuracy and patience because I operate my camera settings manually.
My current camera is a Canon EOS REBEL T3 with a Quantaray 28-200mm macro lens, both of which I've had for several years. It has served me well and gotten me many interesting shots, although some of my favorite photos came from my old FUJIFILM FinePix Z5FD.
A tree standing in the marsh of Lebanon Hills as the sun was setting.
One of my aunt's dahlia flowers that bloomed on our deck the first summer we lived together.
A coral formation taken at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.
A curious fellow eyeing-up the out-of-towners as we tried to locate Austin's convention center.
A banded pennant dragonfly, taken as part of a field study assignment for my Minnesota Natural History course.
Leaves along the edge of the driveway after a late-season snowfall, taken on a day of personal transition.
One of the leopards from the Minnesota Zoo's exhibit. It paced in front of the chain-link barrier of it's enclosure that morning.
The leaves of a red oak tree on the Minnesota Zoo's campus, taken on my way back to class.
A common North America loon that swam alongside my kayak on a northern Minnesota lake one evening.