SPIE in Orlando

I’ll be presenting a talk in Orlando, Florida (U.S.A.) at the SPIE conference “Signal and Data Processing of Small Targets 2010” on Tuesday, 6 April (the final talk of the day). It’s in the Sensor Data and Information Exploitation program track of the “Defense, Security and Sensing” symposium.*

If you can make it there, come and say “g’day”. No doubt there’ll be time for some beer and physics afterwards.

Contact me for the slides from my talk. The title and abstract are below:

Tracking interacting dust: comparison of tracking and state estimation techniques for dusty plasmas

Neil Oxtoby, Jason F. Ralph, Dmitry Samsonov, Céline Durniak

Complex (dusty) plasmas are a convenient mesoscopic test-bed for exploring kinematics of microscopic systems in different phases (fluid-like, crystal-like). Micron-sized ‘dust’ grains within an ion-electron plasma interact via a screened Coulomb interaction. These dust-dust interactions are the principal effect in the observed particle dynamics. This work investigates the accuracy of measurement and tracking techniques in the presence of complex nearest-neighbour interactions and how modern state estimation methods can be used to monitor this complex system. The principal requirement is to simplify the tracking algorithms to reduce the computational costs without reducing the accuracy of the particle tracks.

* “Wow, I love symposia!” - Philip J. Fry (Futurama).

Update! Video is available on You Tube: