New Major OCaml App

New Major OCaml App

[David McClain]

I have just completed another major mathematical analysis program written as
a hybrid OCaml and NML/IPLib program. The OCaml is essential for robustness,
rapid development, near C speeds, and for prefiltering data for the
inherently loosely typed and unsafe NML/IPLib math core.

The program solves for optical aberrations in a sensor based on a random
collection of observed point targets at various sub-pixel phasings. This is
a very difficult, high dimensional, very sparse, optmization problem based
on a Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm. Each iteration of the
program requires typically 900-1000 two dimensional FFT's at anywhere from
128x128 to 512x512 computation cells. It replaces a previous program
developed by another on our team that takes about 40 hours to compute the
solution with one that computes on your average desktop Pentium in about 5
minutes.

You can download a postscript document that describes the math and the
program at www.azstarnet.com/~dmcclain/blurfit3_ps.zip

Thanks again to all the wonderful team at INRIA for such a fabulous
language!

- DM