You can step off an express train but you can’t speed up a donkey. This is paraphrased from ‘The Fly Trap’ by Fredrik Sjöberg in the context of our adoption of faster and faster technology and the associated life style. Last week we stepped briefly off the ‘express train’ and lowered our strain levels by going to a concert given by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, including pieces by Dvorak, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. I am not musical at all and so I am unable to tell you much about the performances or compositions, except to say that I enjoyed the performances as did the rest of the audience to judge from the enthusiastic applause. A good deal of my enjoyment arose from the energy of the orchestra and my ability to recognise the musical themes or acoustic features in the pieces. The previous sentence was not intended as a critic’s perspective on the concert but a tenuous link…

Recognising features is one aspect of my recent research, though in strain data rather than music. Modern digital technology allows us to acquire information-rich data maps with tens of thousands of individual data values arranged in arrays or matrices, in which it can be difficult to spot patterns or features. We treat our strain data as images and use image decomposition to compress a data matrix into a feature vector. The diagram shows the process of image decomposition, in which a colour image is converted to a map of intensity in the image. The intensity values can be stored in a matrix and we can fit sets of polynomials to them by ‘tuning’ the coefficients in the polynomials. The coefficients are gathered together in a feature vector. The original data can be reconstructed from the feature vector if you know the set of polynomials used in the decomposition process, so decomposition is also a form of data compression. It is easier to recognise features in the small number of coefficients than in the original data map, which is why we use the process and why it was developed to allow computers to perform pattern recognition tasks such as facial recognition.

Sources:

Wang W, Mottershead JE, Patki A, Patterson EA, Construction of shape features for the representation of full-field displacement/strain data, Applied Mechanics and Materials, 24-25:365-370, 2010.

Patki, A.S., Patterson, E.A, Decomposing strain maps using Fourier-Zernike shape descriptors, Exptl. Mech., 52(8):1137-1149, 2012.

Nabatchian A., Abdel-Raheem E., and Ahmadi M., 2008, Human face recognition using different moment invariants: a comparative review. Congress on Image and Signal Processing, 661-666.