Tag: standards

Thursday 27 February

We had a leisurely start this morning, getting ready and planning to meet my in-laws at 08:00 for breakfast. We met up and walked over to the City Bakery at Shinagawa Station. We managed to get a table together after a man moved to make way for us. I had scrambled eggs with prosciutto, while the others had baked goods and coffee.

We headed off to catch a train about 09:00, taking the through train on the Keikyu Line to the Asakusa subway line, and alighting at Asakusa Station. My sister-in-law had looked up a cafe that does intricate three-dimensional caffe latte art and wanted to check it out, and it was only a few steps from one of the subway exits, so we walked there, but discovered the place indicated by Google Maps was an empty building! Oh well.

We continued on to the Kaminarimon Gate and then through it to the array of market stall shops beyond. The area was bustling with tourists, though not nearly as crowded as last time M. and I were here in summer, and of course nowhere near as uncomfortably hot. We browsed slowly along the shops, with the others buying a few things along the way.

Eventually we reached the Senso-ji temple. Last time my wife and I were here, the crowds and the weather made us turn back before even going in to see the temple. But today was a lot better and we entered through the huge gate leading into the main courtyard. This Buddhist temple was very different from the Shinto shrine of Meiji Jingu. Here instead of purchasing offerings you could buy fortunes, randomised by shaking a tube of numbered sticks and then taking a printed fortune from a matching numbered drawer. My wife got one and drew a “regular fortune”. The instructions printed near the fortune area said if you get a good fortune you should take it with you, whereas if you get a bad fortune you should tie the paper to nearby racks to leave the bad luck behind you.

We exited to the west side of the main building into the surrounding gardens. These were not very large, but contained well-kept hedges and trees, and a lot of statues, carvings, stone lanterns, smaller outbuildings, and standing stones carved with masses of Japanese text. Reading the informational signs revealed that some of these objects were hundreds of years old, with one stone thought to have been made as far back as 1150.

From this west side of the temple, the others spotted an interesting looking side street with shops that they wanted to check out, so we continued in that direction rather than heading back towards Kaminarimon. We end up doing a large loop around several blocks, but partway through we decided to stop for lunch. It was getting close to midday and we needed to be back on a train heading south soon after 13:00 for me to make the resumption of my ISO Standards meeting at 14:00. (The morning was taken off to allow attendees to visit the CP+ camera show in Yokohama, during the VIP and media opening time, before it opened to the general public.)

I searched the area for suitable eating places to satisfy our various food requirements, and found a cafe called Coffee Kan not far away. It did simple sandwiches and pancakes and some rice and pasta dishes. We got a table straight away and ordered sandwiches, while my wife decided to go out and look around and have the scone she’d brought from our breakfast venue. The sandwiches were pretty good, with nice fresh ingredients and thick fluffy white bread slices.

After eating we met up with my wife outside, who had wandered off to look at some more shops in the area. We walked back to Asakusa Station and boarded a train heading south. On the train I realised that it didn’t seem to stop at Shinagawa, and looking at the line map I realised the subway line branched at Sengakuji, and we were on a train that went the other way. My wife confirmed this with a nice older lady who spoke English, who told us we needed to change trains there. This was only one stop past Mita, where I needed to get off for my ISO meeting, so I suggested we all get off there, and I could check the destination indicators to see what train they needed to get to Shinagawa. I figured it’d probably be the next train behind us. The old lady got off with us and said she was going to Shinagawa too, so she could help my co-travellers to get there. I left them at Mita, exiting the station and walking over to Shibaura for my afternoon of meetings.

This afternoon the first technical session was on image flare characterisation. There was a lot of discussion on determining the appropriate exposure time for taking photos to measure image flare. This is a tricky topic because normal camera exposure is designed for scenes that humans might look at, with more or less even lighting for the most part. But to measure image flare you need to take photos of bright points of light in a dark room, and the camera exposure system freaks out and doesn’t know what to do. So we have to come up with a way of defining what the exposure should be so that you can see and measure the camera flare on the resulting images, without it being overexposed.

The second session was discussing low light performance with hand-held camera shake to evaluate image stabilisation methods. For this one, Dietmar had collated the experiments he’d performed using all of the meeting participants as observers, judging the image quality of various degradations (the one I did on Tuesday). He’d done some preliminary statistics and showed off the numbers. He plans to run many more tests with other observers to build up a solid foundation for determining threshold levels for image acceptable/unacceptable degradation due to low light and image stabilisation.

We finished just before 17:00 and I walked back to our hotel. I walked a different way this time, crossing over the canal to the Shiba side and walking along the main road back to Shinagawa. I detoured off the main road to take a couple of back streets in one area, that looked on the map like it had a lot of shops and restaurants. However it turned out to be mostly residential with only a few restaurants scattered here and there.

After rejoining M. in the hotel room, we arranged to meet T. and K. at 18:00 to go to dinner. We had nothing booked for tonight, with a vague plan to maybe go get some ramen, since ramen places don’t take bookings. I’d done some checking online and found that Ippudo did vegan ramen, and they had a branch in Gotanda, just two stops away on the Yamonote Line, so it was simple to get to. But today at the meeting I double checked the menu and discovered that only certain Ippudo stores had the vegan ramen dishes. The only places in Tokyo were at Shinjuku and Ginza. So we decided to head to Ginza, where the Ippudo was very close to one of the exits from Higashi-Ginza Station.

We arrived and there were two couples ahead of us in the queue for tables, but there were empty seats inside being cleaned up, so we didn’t have long to wait before we were all ushered in. We had a good table for four in the back corner. I ordered the “Akamaru” ramen, which is an Ippudo innovation based on the more traditional “Shiromaru” ramen, which my in-laws opted for when I explained the differences in flavour and richness. My wife decided not to have the vegan ramen after all, and opted for some simple rice with a soft-boiled egg. We also had a serve of gyoza to share as a side. My ramen was really good, and in-laws declared that theirs was really delicious too.

We headed back to our hotel. My mother-in-law turned in for the night while the rest of us went up to the bar at Table 9 Tokyo, the fancy bar/restaurant on the 39th floor of our hotel. It was very funky with ambient dance music and lots of colour-changing lights. The drinks menu was impressive, containing some super expensive whiskies. We had a drink each and stared out at the mesmerising view of Tokyo at night. Our table faced a window looking north to the centre of the city, so it was full of buildings and lights.

After this we headed back down to our rooms for the night.

Wednesday 26 February

We got up at 06:15 and prepared for a quick departure. We need to be at the LOVE sculpture (by Robert Indiana) in Shinjuku by 07:50 for my wife and her mother and sister to meet up for their guided day tour to Mount Fuji. I ran down to the 7-11 to get a caffe latte for my wife while she got up and dressed. I quickly ate a couple of the onigiri I’d bought last night and we dashed out to meet my in-laws in the hotel lobby. I led us all over to Shinagawa Station where we caught a train to Shinjuku again (as for last night’s dinner). Being only 07:00, rush hour hadn’t really gotten underway and the train was not full. This time we wanted a western exit. We found a long tunnel that led for a few blocks west until I decided to ascend to street level. From there it was an easy walk a block to the sculpture meeting point.

We were a bit early and my sister-in-law went to a nearby 7-11 to get a coffee. The tour operator arrived and had the crowd of people waiting there queue up for two different tours, the Mount Fuji one, and a Tokyo city tour. The first was the most popular, with about 50 or 60 people queueing up to register. There were about four buses parked nearby, so presumably they are taking multiple loads of people. My wife got in the queue and I went to collect the in-laws and show them where she was waiting.

With the tour group met up, I left them to head back to Shibaura for today’s ISO meeting session. I thought the best way might be to take a subway line east across central Tokyo, but checking routes revealed the quickest way there was in fact to hop back on the Yamanote Line and go back south through Shinagawa to Tamachi Station. So I did that rather than wrangle with multiple subway lines and changing trains. The station and train was more busy now, with the train ride being full, but not overly crowded. I made it to the CIPA building by 08:30, in plenty of time.

The first technical session today was a discussion of revising the standard on measuring camera resolution. An expert proposed making changes to take into account the fact that different cameras have different colour conversion matrices because of the construction of their RGB filters, so converting the raw signals to luminance to calculate resolution should differ depending on the camera being tested. There was some discussion about this and the exact details of how cameras do this, with Paul (from Apple) pointing out that cameras which measure white balance take that into account and convert the colours differently, so it might not only depend on the hardware, but also very from shot to shot. This needs to be investigated further, so discussion will take place offline outside this meeting.

The next session was about characterising depth camera measurements. This is still in the early development stages, with some basic performance metrics being worked on and tested. The presentation went on to propose further types of measurements that could be made to characterise depth measurements. One interesting point was that some depth cameras produce point clouds while others produce depth maps, and there’s no easy or direct way to compare these two, so there has to be some consideration of how to measure both types with cross-consistency. And another is that it’s difficult to align a depth image for quantitative measurement of resolution because the spatial resolution is often so low that any alignment markers are lost and even with a symmetrical circular target object, the resolution is so low that it’s difficult to locate the centre of the pattern.

The rest of the day was devoted to high dynamic range (HDR) imaging topics. First was a “best practices” discussion for topics related to how to handle and process HDR image files – more like a list of guidelines and recipes than definitional standards. Then was a session on the standardisation of HDR image file format, and then definition of a gain map for conversion to SDR and another representations. And finally a session on HDR camera readouts to enable shooting HDR with quantitative exposure and dynamic range indicators on the camera display.

In between we broke for lunch. I went with Atsushi-san again, and this time he said he’d remembered a ramen place we could go to, since I mentioned ramen yesterday but we ended up going go to a soba/udon place instead. He led us across Tamachi Station to the street on the other side, out of Shibaura and into Shiba. Here he said there was a building with several restaurants inside, including a good ramen place he’d eaten at last year. However when we arrived, the building wasn’t there! It was just a fenced-off hole in the ground, with heavy vehicles ready for a new construction. So we crossed the main road and Atsushi suggested we try a narrow street lined with restaurants. We found a small ramen place with a dozen tightly spaced stools facing the counter and two guys cooking behind it, called らーめん もとまる (Ramen Motomaru).

There was (surprisingly) no queue, so we used the machine at the front to order tonkotsu ramen. We had to specify if we wanted the noodles hard, medium, or soft, and I chose hard.

The hot ramen was delivered just a few minutes later, with a whole soft-boiled egg which I had to cut in half with chopsticks. There was a slice of pork and also small chunks of pork belly in the broth with the noodles, and two sheets of nori.

I added some kimchee from a condiment container. The whole thing was really good and very filling. Atsushi said that here you could get a noodle refill for free if you were still hungry, but I definitely didn’t need any more. After eating and swapping stories we headed back to the meeting for the afternoon session.

The meeting closed for the day at 17:30, and I walked back to the hotel in the twilight. The day was warmer than it has been the past few days, and didn’t feel too bad with a brisk walk. My co-travellers had returned on the shinkansen from Odawara after their Mount Fuji tour and were having a coffee at Blue Bottle when I messaged that I was about to leave the meeting. They spent some time browsing the shops in the hotel lobby area before coming up, so I actually beat them back to the room.

My in-laws decided to do their own thing together for dinner, leaving me and my wife to share a dinner by ourselves. I suggested we walk over to Gotanda, where there appear to be dozens of restaurants according to Google Maps. It was an easy 15 minute walk through areas we hadn’t explored before. Since randomly finding vegetarian Japanese for is next to impossible, we decided to try the Trattoria Arietta, which was one of the first places we came across. It looked very nice and had great reviews, and Italian is reliable for vegetarian options.

We entered and they had a table free in what could be used as a private room, but currently split between a party of four and us. The ambience was nice, with framed photos of Italian sights in black and white on one wall, and colour photos of the Amalfi coast on another. The menu was handwritten in Japanese and English and our waiter, a keen young man, spoke in halting English. The specials blackboard was only in Japanese, but he explained it in English for us. We ordered an insalata caprese as an appetiser, then my wife got the vegetable risotto while I chose the special second dish, which was braised beef cheeks in a red wine sauce. We also ordered a side of roasted vegetables, which the waiter recommended, although I’d already decided on them before he mentioned them. He brought a complimentary bread bowl, with two chunks of focaccia plus two thick slices of baguette.

Everything was delicious, and we washed it down with glasses of excellent red wine, first trying a medium-bodied red from Jura in France, and then a more robust Italian Montepulciano. One oddity was they brought the vegetables out after the salad, and our main dishes were nowhere to be seen. So we ate the vegetables, and the mains only appeared once we’d finished. The beef cheeks were truly excellent, falling apart with a fork they were so tender. My wife said the risotto was great too. The waiter asked if we wanted dessert as he cleared our plates, and we said yes. He reappeared with a large platter with six different mini-desserts on it and described them for us: pannacotta, tiramisu, a polenta cake, home made chocolates, cassata, and another type of gelato. Both of us thought that this was a sharing dessert platter that he’d automatically assumed we wanted when we said we’d have dessert, and were a bit disappointed when he explained further this was the menu and we were to choose desserts from the selection. We chose the pannacotta and cassata, and he took the delicious looking platter away. The actual desserts arrived, larger portions than on the menu display, and were both amazingly good.

It was a really delicious meal and good experience all round. The three men and one woman, dressed in business attire, at the table next to us appeared to be having a set menu banquet as they all had identical dishes in several courses, and were still having their dessert by the time we left. My wife gave our waiter a sticker of a surfing koala from her supply of gifts to give to helpful people, and he was delightfully surprised as he accepted it.

We walked back to our hotel via a slightly different route to see more of the neighbourhood. The area between Shinagawa Station and Gotanda was very quiet, with narrow streets and small houses. Some of the homes were very fancy and expensive looking, some in western architectural styles that didn’t look Japanese at all. It was also very hilly – we had to go up and down two quite steep hills, using steps that connected the roads. Back at the hotel, we retired for the night.