This quarter we’re working on determining temperature from an image. What we’ve done this first week is test out different things we can take these images of. We did a bit of this last quarter, but with our code and analysis nearing completion, we will start gathering images of it this quarter. Last quarter we worked with charcoal briquettes, which turned out to be a great subject because it glowed consistently and brightly (shown in the picture). However, considering the background of our project, we want to be able to use wood as our subject. So this week we started igniting wood to see how it performed. We used a small block (about 1 x 1 x 0.5 inch) of white fir, ignited it with a propane torch, let the flame die out, and saw that the glow was dim (much dimmer than the charcoal briquette) and lasted shortly (about 25 seconds).

We also have been gathering images with our smartphone camera in the lab, capturing images of the light exiting the monochrometer. Similar to last quarter, we are testing and confirming our characterization of the color filter array. In order to use a wider range of intensities we are including a Blue-Green filter to reduce the red intensity and increase the blue and green intensity.

Also, a question came into play in whether or not to use JPEG or RAW type pictures. Our research has shown JPEG does have an effect on gamma, which will introduce errors into our readings. The gamma can be calculated out after finding the correct power and applying in inversely to the intensity.