Fred Weinhaus

After earning a Ph.D. in low temperature physics at Duke University in 1972 and one year as a post-doctoral fellow, I spent 4 years teaching physics and astronomy: one year at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas and three years at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. At Santa Clara, I collaborated on some low temperature research that was exploring certain organic compounds for high temperature superconductivity. I also published two papers on the thermodynamics of interconnected soap bubbles and interconnected rubber balloons.

In 1978, I was hired by the Electromagnetic Systems Laboratories, which had just been acquired as a subsidiary by TRW. Its name was changed to ESL, Inc. By the way, ESL was founded by William Perry, who was subsequently Secretary of Defense. At ESL/TRW, I was involved in computer imaging and computer graphics work, especially for the defense sector of the government, but we also did commercial work for the oil and mineral exploration industry. ESL was a pioneer in the computer imaging industry and sold perhaps the finest digital image processing system ever made. I was one of the principal algorithm developers and application engineers for this system and also trained the customers on its use.

In 1979-1980, I was co-inventor of the Image Perspective Transformation Technology (IPT). This is a photogrammetry-based computer graphics technology that permits overhead photographs of rural and/or urban areas to be reconstructed at arbitrary vantage points, in particular, at ground level. I spent most of my career at ESL/TRW developing this technology. Today, you can see a similar technology at Google Earth.

From 1986-1989, I was a systems engineer at ESL/TRW, responsible for data base development and processing methodology for several visual and infrared flight simulation data base projects and proposals. These activities were based upon the IPT technology.

During 1993 & 1994, I was a project manager and co-venture manager. I launched one of 7 new ventures as part of ESL/TRW's commercial diversification program. This new venture applied the IPT 3-D data base and visualization technology to characterize radioactively hazardous obsolete nuclear fuel processing facilities prior to their decontamination and decommissioning.

After 17 years at ESL/TRW, in 1995, I started a new career jointly doing computer graphics/digital image processing consulting and starting a business as an Internet Entrepreneur. A colleague and I founded a company, called WEBD. For a number of years we did web site development (when it was novel). Some of our clients were major transportation agencies in the western states and medical societies world wide. The company now no longer exists.

From 1998 to 2003, I was a cofounder of three different companies (RealtyVision, SeeitBuyit and OmniVisionLive/Yellowpageslive/RealEstateLive) doing virtual tours on the World Wide Web for real-estate agents and companies and most recently for commercial companies such as restaurants. The first and third companies still exist, but I am no longer active with any of them.

Lately, I have been doing some consulting and for fun have been developing some ImageMagick scripts to perform some out-of-the ordinary image processing operations. ImageMagick is an open-source, cross-platform image processing system.

Here is my list of publications since leaving Duke.

I can be contacted at:

Fred Weinhaus
fmw at alink.net

So ... H.A.T.!