Norton Priory Imaging and Processing

      Week 2: Delays in Image Acquisition & Initial Tests 07/02/2025 Summary of Activities 1.     Image Delay •   Repeatedly reached out for the official IR and visual image bank but still had no official delivery. 2.     Preprocessing Brainstorming •   Despite limited real data, we discussed potential noise reduction, contrast adjustment, and morphological operations in MATLAB. 3.     Test Cases •   Downloaded or generated placeholder/sample images to test our preliminary code structure, ensuring each function worked smoothly.   Challenges/Concerns •   Scheduling Conflicts: Some team members had overlapping lab sessions. We used a shared calendar to align team coding sessions. •   Resource Availability: Confirmed MATLAB license but uncertain about OCR tool- boxes (e.g., Tesseract or Easy OCR integration).

     Week 4: Gravestone OCR & Final Pipeline Integra tion 21/02/2025 Summary of Activities 1.     Applying the Pipeline to Gravestones •   Received a set of gravestone images and used our modular functions to organize (IR vs. visual), enhance, segment, and then run OCR. 2.     OCR Challenges •   Gravestones often have low contrast and weathered text, causing Tesseract/Easy OCR to misinterpret partial letters, moss, cracks, and unusual fonts. •   Tried additional morphological operations and stricter threshold parameters, but results still varied by image condition. 3.     Refined Code for OCR •   Implemented a final function, RefinedEdgeOverlayAndOCR, which merged thresh olding + edge detection and thickened letter boundaries in red. •   This approach slightly improved OCR performance but did not fully solve recognition errors on heavi...

                   Week 3: IR Image Processing & Preliminary MAT- LAB Code 14/02/2025 Summary of Activities 1.     IR Image Analysis •   Finally received a few infrared images (e.g., “IR 00345.jpg”) and tested our Gas- Tube boundary detection script. •   Implemented Gaussian smoothing, contrast enhancement, and Otsu thresholding to isolate key regions (the gas tube). 2.     Segmentation Approaches •   Explored both threshold-based segmentation and Canny edge detection. •   Found that morphological operations (imclose, imopen, imfill) were critical to suppress noise and highlight main object boundaries. 3.     Code Organization •   Consolidated our functions into single MATLAB scripts or Live Scripts. Added thorough inline comments and verified toolbox requirements. Challenges/Concerns •   MATLAB T...

  Week 1: Project Kick-Off & Planning 31/01/2025 Summary of Activities 1.     Initial Project Scope •   Held a meeting to clarify overall project goals: process both IR and visual images, enhance them, and extract meaningful features or text (especially for weathered gravestones). •   Discussed potential segmentation methods, OCR technologies, and the importance of robust pre-processing steps. 2.     Roles Acquiring and organizing images (IR vs.   Visual, Identifiable vs. Non-identifiable).        Image enhancement and feature extraction.      Recognition model development and testing. 3.     Project Aims •   Created a 4-week timeline with clear milestones: –     Week 1: Project setup, role assignments, initial code planning. –     Week 2: Acquire images...