Editing Semester A Progress Report 2012 (section)

===This Year's Progress===
The focus of this years' project is upon the identification of the victim through a 3D reconstruction of a bust that was taken after death. This involves investigating techniques for scanning in the bust in order to create a model on the computer, undistorting the image to correct for any changes that may have occurred after death and in the 60-plus years since the bust was taken, and then colourising the model to accurately portray what the man may have looked like when he was still alive.
Time early on in the project was spent looking into various means of creating the initial 3D model, with different software programs tested and 3D scanning cameras as discussed. With the budget available for the project we were limited in the options we could afford, and so we settled for a low-cost "DAVID Laserscanner" package which seemed to offer the equipment and software we required in one easy to use kit. However, this kit involves the use of a laser line, and these are potentially harmful due to the high power of laser that is used (approximately 5mW). In order to be approved for the use of this kit, we were required to discuss and produce a Risk Assessment and Standard Operating Procedure applicable for our project.
After meeting with one of the Engineering School's Research Engineers, Henry Ho, it fell to me to draft the initial Risk Assessment and Standard Operating Procedure. Once this was  done, we again met with Henry to refine the documents, then submitted them for approval in order to begin scanning the bust. As of today we are still currently waiting for approval or the kit to be released to us, and this unforeseen delay has pushed back the scanning until the second half of the year. However we are confident that we should not be held up much longer, and may be able to make a start during the mid-year break. We have also sought to expand the range of languages considered, as the original investigation was limited to primarily western-European languages. In order to speed up this process, I wrote a simple Java program which took in a text file and output a list of the letters of the alphabet and a value alongside each indicated the number of times that letter occurred in the file. The aim was to then write a "batch file" for windows in order to process a large number of languages in one go, and then analyse the frequency distributions of each to compare with the code. This was then adjusted by Tom to be done entirely within Java using a driver program, with the output then imported by Microsoft Excel to do the statistical analysis. I also modified the program to only take the first letters of each word and count the occurrences of these, since this was suggested as more similar to the code by the group from 2009.