Leonardo's Challenge

Forget Darpa's shredder challenge, this one has waited millions of years to get to us. You probably recall this entry on Leonardo, a fossilized mummy of a 65 million years old dinosaur (i.e. internal organs and the skin have been fossilized!). If you don't remember that entry, please take a second to read it again. I also added the attendant video:

I have been talking to some of the folks involved in this video. In particular Tom Kaye and Art Anderson. Tom is the person who provided software that could enhance the shots while Art is the person behind the actual X-ray taking at Ellington Fields (the shots were so powerful they had to do them at night when nobody would be around the hangars where the X-ray machine performed).

These X-ray shots are very unique and Art kindly provided a large suite of these shots for this challenge. Leonardo's challenge is pretty simple: Can we reconstruct something beyond just playing on the contrast ? Reconstruction may not mean 3D reconstruction, one could simply play with the contrast and SIFT points to assemble the different images together (as we don't have any reference on how these shots were taken)..it's your turn to be smart about how to use this pretty unique dataset....I'll feature the best efforts on the blog.

Here some example of enhancement Tom did:

Before

After

The Leonardo Challenge Dataset is here.

Thanks Art for making it happen.

Liked this entry ? subscribe to Nuit Blanche's feed, there's more where that came from. You can also subscribe to Nuit Blanche by Email, explore the Big Picture in Compressive Sensing or the Matrix Factorization Jungle and join the conversations on compressive sensing, advanced matrix factorization and calibration issues on Linkedin.