MATLAB (Finally)

I've already told in the 'About me' section that I'm highly fond of Matlab. The developers at Mathworks Inc. have done a fabulous job developing this wonderful software. Various add-ons and toolboxes make it a very handy and useful tool. To study Matlab under Dr. Pawar sir, the master himself, makes it even more interesting. Image processing is one area of Matlab which is not explored as much as the others. I tell you, Matlab is a very powerful image processing tool!!

Availability of various inbuilt filters, the ease of conversion between unsigned integers and other formats, the ease of accessing the image and assigning the pixels to the variables in a matrix make it a very powerful image processing tool. Sir explained in the last lecture about the idea of accessing individual frames from a video and processing them to perform the function you want. What amazes me especially is that a simple command - imread - lets you access the pixels of the image in the form of a matrix and you can do whatever you want with the image. One important application of this technique is in encrypting and decoding secret information. Using the bit-plane slicing technique, one can embed the coded information into the lower most significant bit, covered up by the image to disguise the information as a picture. It will be almost impossible for a pedestrian to decode the information without prior knowledge. Secondly, one can even add Gaussian/Laplacian blur using simple low-pass filters to make this system even more complicated to decode. Using a suitable type of mask/neighborhood approximation technique, the information to be coded can be scrambled and sent for added security. I realize that as I start digging more and more into this wonderful software, I am able to develop more and more insight into it and imagine the possible applications of the product. Using suitable image processing softwares with MATLAB will prove to be a boon, very soon!!

Accounting for another application, I figured out that one can even combine Linux and MATLAB into an intelligent eye-detection and tracking mechanism. I googled for 'an eye detection and tracking using Matlab' and found some inefficient yet interesting stuff. We can as well use Linux to access the frames, but processing them using Matlab in Linux makes it difficult. So, I'd rather download freewares from the internet - which allow me to access individual frames from a video, which I can process as per my will. I am going to make a small project related to eye-detection and tracking once I get accustomed to the image processing toolbox of Matlab. 

As for the bit-plane slicing and averaging/masking operation, I am going to upload the code pretty soon. Keep in touch :)