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Monday, 28 July 2008, 21:21:12 EDT

It has been over two months since I last posted anything here. I have been so busy with school I just didn't feel like writing about anything. But now... I have finished! Earlier this afternoon I turned in the final draft of my senior paper. Unless I get an e-mail from my advisor in the morning, with some last minute suggestions, it is done. Once that grade is committed to the record I will officially be a graduate.

The mathematics program at CSU has a capstone course MATH 4990, or Senior Seminar. In this course, you are required to do independent research on some area of mathematics that has not been covered in the degree courses. Each student is paired with an advisor who will work with them on their research. At the end of the semester the student has to present their work in a thirty minute presentation. The student also has to write a thorough paper on their topic.

I chose to research the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), specifically the Haar wavelet. The typical research application is image compression. Instead of doing the same thing that has been done numerous times, my advisor suggested I compare wavelet image compression with some other image compression. So in my paper I compare using the Haar wavelet to compress images with using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The DCT is the basis of JPEG image compression.

I started my research back in January. When the spring semester was coming to a close my advisor and I agreed that there wasn't enough time for me to finish the paper. So I took an incomplete in the course to finish the paper over the summer semester. That means I have been working on this paper for the past seven months. This is why there have not been many updates here. I didn't want to write about my work until it was finished, but there was little else about which I could write.

But now it is finished. So I present you with the finished result (local copy). If you actually read the paper, I hope you enjoy it. There is plenty of room for improvement, but I think it is quite good as it is. Hopefully you will feel the same.