from down-under, Lake Menteith upside-down

The dataset used in Bayesian Core for the chapter on image processing is a Landsat picture of Lake of Menteith in Scotland (close to Loch Lomond). (Yes, Lake of Menteith, not Loch Menteith!) Here is the image produced in the book. I just got an email from Matt Moores at QUT that the image is both rotated and flipped:

The image of Lake Mentieth in figure 8.6 of Bayesian Core is upside-down and back-to-front, so to speak. Also, I recently read a paper by Lionel Cucala & J-M Marin that has the same error.

This is due to the difference between matrix indices and image coordinates: matrices in R are indexed by [row,column] but image coordinates are [x,y]. Also, y=1 is the first row of the matrix, but the bottom row of pixels in an image.

Only a one line change to the R code is required to display the image in the correct orientation:

image(1:100,1:100,t(as.matrix(lm3)[100:1,]),col=gray(256:1/256),xlab="",ylab="")

As can be checked on Googlemap, the picture is indeed rotated by a -90⁰ angle and the transpose correction does the job!

The great’08 Pascal challenge

In order to make advances in the processing of their datasets and experiments, and in the understanding of the fundamental parameters driving the general relativity model, cosmologists are lauching a competition called the great’08 challenge through the Pascal European network. Details about the challenge are available on an arXiv:0802.1214 document, the model being clearly defined from a statistical point of view as a combination of lensing shear (the phenomenon of interest) and of various (=three) convolution noises that make the analysis so challenging, and the date being a collection of images of galaxies. The fundamental problem is to identify a 2d-linear distortion applied to all images within a certain region of the space, up (or down) to a precision of 0.003, the distortion being identified by an isotonic assumption over the un-distrorted images. The solution must be efficient too in that it is to be tested on 27 million galaxies! A standard MCMC mixture analysis on each galaxy is thus unlikely to converge before the challenge is over, next April. I think the challenge is worth considering by statistical teams, even though this represents a considerable involvement over the next six months….