Today was day 1 of the ISO Photography Standards meeting here in Sydney. I had a chore to do first thing in the morning, dropping Scully off at doggy daycare, since me and my wife would both be out all day. This would have been fine, except it was absolutely pouring rain, and the nearest parking to the daycare place is not very close. So I got pretty wet, and then had to dash back home and walk straight to the railway station in order to make it to the meeting in time. I got there with my trousers wet from the knees down.
I met the overseas delegates and made many apologies for the weather. There was a good turnout, and we got down to business with the opening administrative session. Then later we had technical sessions on vocabulary, for proposing and deliberating definitions of standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) imaging environments. There are no standard definitions of these, so we debated the technical merits of several proposed wordings, and although we reached rough agreement there was still some dissatisfaction. But we will produce a draft document and it will go through rounds of commenting, so it can be further refined.
The other technical session was a new one on machine vision cameras, with a proposal from the European Machine Vision Association to submit one of their standards for characterising image sensor quality for ISO adoption. This is very different from our usual photographic use case, because for machine vision we don’t care about human aesthetics. For example: periodic noise patterns in images are extremely distracting to humans, but quantitatively are not different from random noise in a machine vision application. So the noise calculation formulae are very different.
We finished just a few minutes early and I headed home. I made enchiladas for dinner, and made a new Darths & Droids strip for Thursday, since I won’t have any time tomorrow.
New content today: