Hello world,
I am excited at the prospect of attending this year’s Frontiers in Optics (FiO) for the first time. I am looking forward to its collegial flavor and high-quality work in areas of basic optics, information processing, and microscopy. I also happen to be one of the official bloggers for FiO. I am not sure if this is the first year of inviting prospective attendees to blog about the conference, but it is a great idea for receiving honest feedback about the event. The message to the official bloggers from the OSA was not to be ’sales-persons’ for the conference but reporters true to their observations. Did I mention FiO is collegial? I look forward to meeting in person people coordinating this blogging effort – KiKi, Janessa, and Robert.
I haven’t yet sorted out finances, but I am hopeful. I am going to present two papers at the conference:
- The first one is about modeling of imaging methods that use large illumination apertures (termed partially coherent imaging methods). A brief abstract can be found here. This work generalizes our approach of modeling the differential interference contrast (as published in Optics Express here).
- The second one has more of an image processing flavor. It is about registration of gradients of given function. Registration of multiple measurements of a 2D function is well-studied in the form of image registration based on intensity correlation. But this framework is not applicable to registration of images obtained with microscopic methods that measure gradients of specimen’s optical thickness. I extend a robust image registration method of phase correlation to registration of gradient data. Abstract is here.
Our group has recently caught interest in phase-space representations (whose patent identity is Wigner distribution function) of optical signals and systems. I am particularly interested in phase-space analysis and design of partially coherent imaging systems. A useful review about phase-space optics can be found on Dr. Martin Baastian’s site who is one of the leaders in this area. It is great that FiO is going to have a special symposium on these ideas. Information about this and other special symposia is here. If you are going to be at the conference and have similar interests, we should meet up!
When it comes to optics conferences, a few come to mind just because of their shear size: OSA’s Frontiers in Optics et al., OSA’s Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics et al., SPIE’s Photonics West (PW), and SPIE’s Photonics Europe. The ‘et al.’ hints to the fact that all of these are actually ’super-conferences’ comprising of multiple conferences. SPIE tends to consider each technical session a conference and therefore there are tens of simultaneous conferences. OSA on the other hand likes an approach of bringing together a set of large conferences. These large conferences let you find connections to your work in other fields. But you may feel lost among lots of parallel sessions and too many ideas ringing in your head.
