The first major activity for the students is the short course in Computer Vision. The lecture component of this course will be a one-day meeting each week for six weeks. These lectures will be shared by the principal investigators, with Professors Shah and Bowyer handling most of the lecture time. During the remainder of each week, the students will be assigned some readings in the area covered by the lecture material and be given one or two short programming projects which support the material. In the first two weeks, some extra instruction in C programming, X windows and use of the SUN workstation will be given. (This will be done at both UCF and USF, in addition to the once a week joint meetings at UCF for the short course.) This method of scheduling and presenting the short course was arrived at after review of the 1989/90 project and discussions with the participants about the effectiveness of the six straight days format versus the one day a week for six weeks format.
In the third week of July, each of the faculty members will suggest a number of possible projects and research topics. Each student will be asked to select a specific project. Students will then be given background reading assignments and program projects for their chosen project. By the end of this period, they should be prepared to write a detailed prospectus of their proposed research project.
In this time period, we will hold joint meetings at which each REU participant will present their proposed research project plan. The other members of the group will provide comments and constructive criticism. Then the participants will be able to revise their plan and pursue their projects full-time until the beginning of the fall semester.
During the Fall and Spring semesters, the students will continue working on their individual projects. There will be two meetings of the entire REU group during each semester, to review the projects and discuss the problems encountered and the progress made. The students will make presentations of their projects, and when appropriate will demonstrate their results on Sun workstations. Further, the participants will be taken to at least one conference at which Computer Vision is a major topic. At the end of the year, each student will be asked to write a comprehensive report describing the project. Students with publishable results will be encouraged to write conference and/or journal papers.