The "Friends of the RPTU in Kaiserslautern association" (Freundeskreis der Rheinland-Pfälzischen Technischen Universität (RPTU) in Kaiserslautern e. V.) honored eight young researchers for their outstanding theses at an award ceremony on June 15th. Among them was the PhD thesis of Dr. Tessa Nogatz (Statistics Group). The Statistics Group congratulates Tessa Nogatz for this special award.
In her dissertation Mrs. Nogatz investigated the estimation of motion from time series of images from X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT). In so-called in situ tests a materials test is combined with the acquisition of images to provide a good representation of local material behavior. Such tests are required when extremely complex materials such as foams or concrete are investigated. Although this technique is widely used, an exact mathematical treatment in this field is still missing. Mrs. Nogatz filled this gap with her doctoral thesis. Besides considering various 3D methods from materials science and medicine, she also found out that an extension and adaptation of established 2D algorithms yields particularly good results and clearly surpasses the current standard. She always kept a clear focus on the diverse challenges in materials science: not only can spatially sparse structures be better processed with her methods, but she also developed an innovative approach for extremely large CT images using morphological wavelets. Her algorithm requires only a fraction of the original image size to decide whether or not a motion-indicated crack is present in concrete, for example - important groundwork for the challenges of ever-increasing data volumes in the coming years.