standards – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Late night Zoom meeting for photography standards

I’m up late tonight because I have a Zoom meeting for ISO Photography Standards, beginning at 11pm. I’m on a special ad-hoc committee to consider the issue of skin tone colours on photographic test charts. We specify various International Standard printed test charts that people can use to test camera colour reproduction. And of course skin tones are of crucial importance because of how sensitive we are to when they don’t look quite right, so many of the charts include patches of colours meant to represent skin tones. But the issue is that many of these were designed decades ago, and the representation is mostly based on European, light skin tones, with few or no darker tones.

So we’ve assembled a group of experts from around the world to consider how we specify these going forward, in a more inclusive way. We need to think about and discuss what range of colours to specify, how they should be reproduced and displayed, and how their reproduction should be quantified and measured. It’s complicated by the fact that our visual system is very finely attuned to skin tones, not just as flat colours that might be printed on a chart, but also by spectral reflectance, lighting and metamerism effects, subsurface scattering, angular effects, and salience effects caused by our brain’s innate ability to recognise the difference between an actual person and a patch of colour.

Some of the group members have been discussing in email the potential need to specify test charts with fully three-dimensional models of human faces with synthetic skin that includes translucent layers, which is a far cry from the traditional methods of testing camera colour reproduction with a printed flat chart with square patches of solid colour. So… I expect this Zoom meeting is going to be concentrating on what exactly the scope of our problem is, and how complicated we should go in addressing the fundamental problem of expanding the range of skin tones in our standards.

In other happenings, I basically spent all day today writing my lesson plans for this week’s new Outschool ethics classes, on the topics of Candy for the younger kids, and Fossil Fuels for the older ones. I also made quiche for dinner, using cauliflower leaves as the vegetable in the filling, which turned out pretty good. I’m pretty stoked to discover that the leaves on cauliflowers are not only edible, but yummy.

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Some family revelations

Friday was a very busy day. I had a two-hour Zoom meeting with the Standards Australia committee for photography, which I chair. This was the follow-up for the ISO meeting I attended in Japan last month, for which I wrote the summary report recently. It was a well-attended meeting, and we had a new committee member to welcome, which was good. I went through all of the technical and administrative discussions from Japan, filling everyone in on developments. And then we had some Australian admin stuff to attend to, like updating adoption of international standards that have been revised, and organising preparations for hosting an ISO meeting here in Sydney in October 2024. I also said I was planning to travel to the next meeting in Finland in November this year, for which I can most likely get travel funding.

After that meeting I went out to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and then return home in time for three ethics classes in a row.

And then after a quick dinner I went over to a friend’s place for board games night. We ended up with five people attending, and played games of Jump Drive, Gin Crafters, Fujiyama, and then four of them set up for Codenames while I went home a bit early, since I needed to be up a little early today.

Because this morning my wife started a new hobby! She left early to go to a local community garden and do some gardening work there. She came home with a bag of vegetables, mostly various leafy greens but also some potatoes, radishes, and Jerusalem artichokes. I had some of the salad greens on my lunch sandwiches.

After lunch we drove up to Gosford to visit my mother. We haven’t seen her for several months, because of various cancellations due to COVID and other illnesses. We took the souvenirs from Japan for her: a box of matcha chocolates, and a jar of spicy Japanese seasoning to use on her cooking.

While we were chatting, conversation turned to travel, about our recent trip to Japan, and then when we went to Germany last year and saw my aunt (my mother’s sister). And my mother said she was so thankful that we arranged a Zoom call with her sister before she died last year. And then she said, “You know we weren’t really sisters, right?”

I said, “What??”

My mother proceeded to explain that her and her older sister had different fathers, and both were different to the father of their three younger siblings (my other two aunts and uncle). Basically, the man who I’d thought was my grandfather for my whole life until today, wasn’t my mother’s biological father. (Nor the father of my mother’s older sister.) She said that her older sister’s father was an American soldier, based in Germany at the end of World War II. And her own father… she had no idea who he was. My “grandfather” had formally adopted my grandmother’s two children when they got married, and then gone on to have three more children together.

I had no idea about any of this before today. So, the gist of it from my point of view is that… I don’t have any idea who my grandfather is. The man who I thought was my grandfather wasn’t. And both he and my grandmother are now dead, so there’s nothing to be learnt there. My mother says that her mother told her this at some point (roughly when she was middle-aged), and her mother had urged her to go find her real father in Germany, but my mother had stated that the man who raised her was her father as far as she was concerned, and she had no desire to seek out anyone else. So I think the window has closed to learning any more.

It’s not a life-shattering revelation, but it does feel a bit odd to learn this so late in my own life. I don’t think it makes any practical difference, but now there’ll always be a bit of wondering about the truth.

On the drive home we stopped off at a suburb on the northern end of Sydney for dinner. We found a place called Burger Hounds and had burgers. I tried the “Honey Badger”, a fried chicken burger with spiced honey and coleslaw. It was a bit sweet, spicy, and really delicious. This was a really good burger place and was doing a cracking business in people eating in and also take-away orders.

A couple of hours later and I’m still full from that burger…

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Caramel slice photos

Here are some photos of that caramel slice I made last night.

First, the base has been baked in the left, and I’m making the caramel filling.

I think the base is meant to be a bit more uniform in colour. I could have mixed the flour, coconut, brown sugar, and butter more thoroughly. But it didn’t affect the texture. Second, here’s the caramel filling after baking:

And then here are the final cut pieces of the slice, with the chocolate top layer:

And it tastes delicious! Overall I’m really happy with how it went.

Today I spent much of the day writing up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Japan, for Standards Australia. I have a meeting next week to fill in the Australian experts committee on all of the events from that Japan meeting.

And finally today, I know that much of the northern hemisphere is currently in the middle of record-breaking heatwaves. The stories have been shown here about heat in southern Europe, east Asia, and North America. But here in the south it’s winter at the moment, so we’re not especially hot, but we are also experiencing highly unusual warmth for this time of the year. It actually really feels like spring already, and it’s confusing many of the plants, with potentially devastating consequences for our crops. There was a story about it in the news today.

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Okayama: Photography meeting day 3

This morning after getting up and having the breakfast things we’d bought last night from a 7-Eleven, my wife and I walked over to the same coffee shop where she’d had a coffee yesterday morning. This time the staff pointed out that I needed to order something if I wanted to sit there with her (which they hadn’t done yesterday!), so I had to get up and go straight to my meetings.

This morning we had technical discussion on: photographic vocabulary and definitions (updating the existing standard), an additional presentation on HDR held over from yesterday, and the ISO DNG format. Following this we moved into the closing administrative session, which was broken in two by lunch.

We broke for lunch by 12:15 and I met up with my wife at our usual spot. I’d searched and found a couple of bakeries that we could walk to and try for lunch: Hattori Bagel, and Espresso Bar – The MARKET. We walked past the bagel place first and went on to check The MARKET. My wife liked the look of the bagel place, but liked The MARKET better. It looked like a boutique bakery with small loaves of interesting grainy bread, biscuits, scones, and things, They had a lunch menu with a few choices of vegetarian dish plus the soup of the day, and also some sandwiches and focaccia, mostly vegetarian but with a couple of tuna/salmon options.

I chose the brown rice quiche and soup, while she grabbed a fig scone and a lemon/tea scone to have with a caffe latte. We sat at a table outside on a small wooden patio, so we could enjoy the quiet street ambience. The soup turned out to be what I think was green split pea. The quiche had chunks of sweet potato and onion in it and was pretty good.

As we were eating it began raining, out of today’s overcast sky. At least the weather is cooler today. We walked back to the Convention Centre in the sparse but heavy drops, where we parted ways again until later in the afternoon.

Back in the meeting, I assisted with drafting of the WG18 resolutions, and then we had the final administrative session for the working group. But that’s not the end of the whole meeting! There were still TC42 sessions later today, and tomorrow.

The WG18 meeting wrapped up by 14:00 and I returned to the hotel to meet my wife again. After a bit of a rest we went out to the giant Aeon shopping mall across the street so I could have a look around, and also to buy a cheap umbrella which may be needed in the next few days as rainy weather is forecast. I also checked out a couple of game and hobby shops to see if they had any interesting things. I found some Japanese Magic: the Gathering cards, but not for the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty expansion, for which I might have considered buying a few. So I saved money but not buying any!

We came back to the hotel and soon after I went back to the Convention Centre for the second administrative working group session. After this I went over to the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel to meet my wife there in the lobby before we went to the meeting reception up on the level 19 Sky Lounge. It was a standing buffet with a wide range of food: little fried crumbed things, prawns in a spicy sauce, pieces of steamed fish, chicken pieces in another sauce. There were several vegetarian options including roast vegetables, mini quiches, mini sushi rolls with three different fillings, salads, and some other things. They also had chefs preparing fresh sushi, served six pieces to a small wooden box, and plates of freshly fried tempura with vegetables, prawns, and fish pieces. There were also dainty pieces of three different types of cakes, and cut pieces of various fruits for desserts.

The Japanese organising hosts and the TC 42 chair gave brief welcoming speeches and then we started eating and chatting with various delegates. There was entertainment: firstly singing by the main woman on the local organising committee, then a musical performance by delegates on recorder, trumpet, and clarinet, with same woman and a man I didn’t recognise doing some brief vocals towards the end of an original composition written by the guy playing the recorder. And finally after these there was a pantomime performance with a narrating drummer announcing various things in Japanese, while a dancer dressed as a samurai performed, then two dragons appeared (performed as large puppets by men inside the dragons), leading to a fight in which the samurai cut the dragons’ heads off.

We chatted with various people, and it was good to hear that many are excited to come to Australia again next year when hopefully I will be hosting the WG18 meeting in October 2024. It was a good event, and the view from the Sky Lounge was wonderful, with panoramic windows to the north and south showing off the city of Okayama and the mountains to the north, as the sun went down. The reception was scheduled until 20:00, and in true Japanese fashion the hotel staff announced it was over and ushered everyone out right on time.

We’d had plenty to eat for dinner and so just headed back to the hotel via a 7-Eleven to get some breakfast supplies. Then it was showers and bed time.

Okayama: Photography meeting day 2

I slept a bit better but not fully through the night. We got up at 07:00 and had breakfast in the hotel room with the things we’d bought last night. I had a salmon onigiri and a small set of sushi rolls. My wife had a red bean paste bun, and then tried what she thought was simply some plain type of mini bread rolls, but which turned out to be a “3 flavours” thing with chocolate, custard, and red bean paste in the middle of the mini rolls!

After this we prepared for the day and left around 08:00. My wife walked with me to the coffee shop I found yesterday near the Convention Centre and got a latte there. We parted and I went to the meetings, while she was planning to visit the Okayama Prefectural Museum and Okayamajinja shrine.

The ISO meeting today started with a session on a proposal for measuring the information capacity of camera systems, using Shannon information theory. Then we discussed angle-dependent image flare measurement, followed by depth camera characterisation for accuracy and resolution.

We broke for lunch a little early. I met my wife and we walked north of the Convention Centre to find one of the lunch places recommended by the meeting organisers. We found the place called Sanuki Otoko Udon Nose and were looking at the picture menu board outside, which looked like it had some suitable vegetarian options for her. Then one of the Japanese delegates from my meeting came out and said hello, and asked if we needed any assistance with the Japanese. I asked if there were vegetarian options and he pointed out a few on the menu board outside, so we went in. We all had to wait a few minutes for a table, and my meeting colleague was with two other Japanese delegates, so I reintroduced them to my wife (they probably met briefly last year in Cologne at the beer garden dinner).

A couple of minutes later we were seated at the central bar-like area. The waitress gave us an English menu, and my wife picked a dish of cold udon noodles with kelp and some other vegetables, plus a quail egg. I chose a bowl of hot noodles with tempura prawns and vegetables, which came with a smaller bowl of dipping sauce and a plate of chopped spring onions, sesame seeds, and ginger. My Japanese colleague helped us interpret the waitress, who was asking a couple of questions. He said that the dishes came in three sizes, which he described as 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. We both asked for the 1.0 versions. She also wanted to know if she should bring the cold noodles first, or wait until the other dish was cooked so we could eat together, and we chose the latter.

The meals came and they were both substantial. The quail eggs were raw. My wife mixed hers through the cold noodles with the sauce, while I put mine into my dipping sauce and swirled it around. We filled up quickly and were very glad we’d chosen the 1.0 size! After paying (cash only) the cheap ¥1700 for the meals, I left my wife at the nearby Hokancho shopping street so she could look around there, while I headed back to the meeting.

The next session was about camera autofocus repeatability. And then there was a long session on high dynamic range photo display and gain maps for dynamic range conversion. This included a couple of interesting demos of HDR image conversion and display, using an Apple HDR monitor to show off the images. This was pretty impressive, and hopefully a preview of a near future with easy access to HDR images and good ways of displaying them for people on all sorts of display hardware.

The digital photography working group session ended by 17:00, but I had an extra two hour meeting until 19:00 with the TC 42 Administrative Working Group, which deals with business matters at the higher technical committee level.

After this I left and met up with my wife again. We dropped my bag off at our room and then walked over to Omame-dokoro Masu, a place described by Google as a tofu restaurant. It had good reviews and many people saying it was great for vegetarians. We found what I thought was the place, but it was difficult to tell as there were three doors close to each other, and no English anywhere in sight. We poked our noses in one and I asked the staff inside simply “tofu?” and they nodded, so we entered and took seats at the bar counter. The place was tiny and there were just seven seats, but there was also apparently an upstairs room with other customers up there.

One staff member typed on his phone and then showed us a translation which said, “Sorry the menu is only in Japanese.” We said that was okay, and I used Google’s photo translate on my phone to get an idea of what was on the menu. We ordered the “peanut tofu” appetiser, “special tofu dumplings”, and “assortment of 6 types of fried tofu – sweet and spicy sauce, spicy miso, plum meat, dengaku, grated radish, fried garlic”. I assumed “plum meat” meant the flesh of a plum. I got a beer to drink and M. tried a “Calpis”, which turned out to be a milky yoghurt drink, which she liked. The last dish arrived first, being six blocks of fried tofu topped with the various things. But one looked suspiciously like tiny fish and tasted to me a bit like it, so I asked after looking up the Japanese word for fish, and the guy confirmed it was indeed fish. So I ate that one, but my wife had the dengaku (miso) one and half of each of the others.

Then the dumplings arrived, looking like fried gyoza. I tried one, and the filling was very suspiciously meaty. I asked the guy, who asked another staff member, who said they had chicken in them. So this was a bit surprising! I ate them, and they were good, but my wife was left not having any. We ordered a couple of other things, this time asking to confirm they were fully vegetarian before ordering. So it was a bit of a mixed bag, with unexpected items and surprise meat in dishes. I wonder how many vegetarians have gone to this place and assumed the entire menu was vegetarian, and came away thinking some of the dishes had surprisingly good “imitation meat” in them!

We were full, and walked home along another different route for variety. We stopped in at 7-Eleven for more breakfast supplies and then went back to the hotel for the night. I grabbed a random ice cream which had zebras on the wrapper, and it turned out to be vanilla ice cream with ripply stripes of chocolate through it, and was quite good. So it was really a day of surprising food!

Okayama: Photography meeting, day 1

Today was the opening day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I’m here in Okayama for. It’s being held at the Okayama Convention Centre, which is just a few minutes walk from our hotel, on the opposite side of the main train station.

For breakfast we went to a nearby 7-Eleven and picked up some packaged onigiri and a couple of random sweet things and headed back to the hotel room to eat them. After that, I walked the short distance to the Convention Centre, and found the meeting room, where I was early, but the Japanese admin staff had already set up. There were coffee and tea and some simple snacks, including some specialities local to Okayama:

Kibi-dango – small type of mochi
Ote-manju – very thin flour based shell filled with adzuki paste
Yumesen – “waffle” wafers filled with cream, vanilla or matcha

This meeting is a Plenary meeting for all of ISO Technical Committee 42 Photography, which is the umbrella committee for our technical activities in Working Group 18 on digital photography. The whole committee also includes other working groups dealing with photo printing, image stability, storage, and other issues related to physical photography. We only have a plenary meeting once every two years, and in between the separate working groups have their own technical meetings (WG18 meets three times a year). The first part of the meeting this morning was a plenary session, which was essentially administrative business for TC42 as a whole. It was also the first chance for the new chair of TC42 to lead a face-to-face plenary meeting after the 2021 meeting was replaced by a fully virtual meeting due to COVID.

After that plenary session we had the opening session of the WG18 meeting, again more administrative stuff. The main thing for me was discussion and planning of the meeting scheduled for Sydney in October 2024. We needed to decide on the dates, bearing in mind things like technical conferences that some members may be attending around the same time of the year, so there are no travel clashes. We decided on the week of 14-18 October, 2024.

During the lunch break I went by myself to a curry house not far away and had a Japanese curry with vegetables and a fried pork cutlet.

After lunch we had the first technical session. This discussed work on standards related to low light camera performance with simulation of human hand shake (i.e. not using a tripod), the memory model used for storage of digital images by cameras, and definitions of camera pixel-related specifications (like exactly what a megapixel is and how to count them for camera sensors). These sessions took us through to the close for the day, which finished a half hour early, at 16:30.

After the meeting I returned to the hotel and met my wife (who actually came out to meet me halfway) and then a little later we went out for dinner. I wanted to try an okonomiyaki place that I’d found with reviews saying they did a good vegetarian version. It was just around the corner from CBD Green where we had dinner last night, and in fact we’d walked around to have a look at it then. It was a little hard to tell which place it was, as there was no English signage at all, but it looked popular with a queue of people waiting for tables. So we went a bit early tonight to hopefully beat the queues.

When we got there, the place only had two tables occupied out of about ten, so we were seated and they turned the hotplate in the middle of our table on to heat up. The waitress apologised that they didn’t have menus in English. I said we wanted okonomiyaki and my wife was vegetarian, and she said that was okay. She went down a list of options, pointing at the lines on the Japanese menu: beef, pork, prawns, squid, mix, and also the same again with noodles. We opted for the noodle-free versions, I got the mix and my wife the vegetarian. We were looking forward to cooking them ourselves on the hotplate, but we noticed a guy cooking things on a bigger hotplate at the kitchen/bar area. One set of cooked noodles came out for one of the other tables and they put it on their hotplate and turned it down to just keep it hot. Then soon after they brought our already cooked okonomiyaki over and did the same.

Oh well. We still got to add our own sauce and mayonnaise and kelp flakes, and bonito shavings on mine. And it was really good. Although they were a little on the small side compared to other places where I’ve had okonomiyaki before. But they were very inexpensive. The whole meal, plus a glass of beer for me came to only ¥21,000, or about A$21.

We explored a little further down the street where the restaurant was, as it looked interesting, with dozens of other small restaurants lining the sides. Then we walked back to the station, where earlier we’d seen a take-away crepe place, with a queue of people waiting to order. I fancied one of those for dessert to make the total dinner more substantial. When we got there, there was still a long queue, and I realised why when I saw a sign that indicated that the place was having a one-day sale, and all crepes were only ¥390. In fact, the queue was even longer than it looked, because we saw a young couple try to join on the end, only to be escorted by a staff member outside the food hall area, to an additional roped off queuing area out in the main station concourse, where more customers were already waiting! So… we decided not to bother queuing up for crepes, and I got a Belgian waffle from another place nearby, a peach and strawberry one. It was very good – crisp crust, chewy interior, and good strawberry flavour in the waffle itself, topped with a peach cream.

Back in the hotel we showered and prepared for another earlyish night, with hopefully a solid sleep for myself this time.

Day full of Zoom meetings

I had outschool ethics classes at 8am and 9am, followed immediately by a Zoom meeting from 10-12 for planning the agenda for the ISO Photography standards meeting in Japan in two weeks.

Then at 1pm I had another Zoom meeting, this time with the professor of the university courses I’m tutoring. We’re gearing up for running the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition course again in semester two (beginning in August), and he wanted to go over some suggestions that I ad at the end of last year’s course for improving the course material and presentation. I’d written a list of things, and we went over those so he understood everything. I would be happy to help produce some of the extra diagrams I suggested, but I’m very busy the next few weeks preparing and then travelling to Japan, and also he didn’t want me working on course material without getting paid and he doesn’t have budget for that.

Tonight I have another ISO Zoom meeting, scheduled for 11pm-midnight my time. This is an ad-hoc group meeting for the depth camera performance topic. I missed the last one two weeks ago because I was sick. I may skip this one too, because honestly I don’t contribute much to the discussion, as it’s the others who are doing experiments with the equipment in their labs.

In between I took Scully for a couple of walks, avoiding the large band of rain that crossed Sydney in mid-afternoon. For dinner I made spätzle with split pea soup. My mother used to make spätzle a lot when I was growing up, and I made it a bit too when I first moved out, but haven’t done it much for many years now. I should do it more often.

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Back into teaching and comics

Friday night was online board games night with friends, so I skipped my daily update. After missing last week’s face-to-face games due to COVID, it was nice to get together online and play some games.

My Friday was very busy. I had my first ethics classes since cancelling a week’s worth while I got over COVID. I had one at 9am, which I’d moved an hour earlier because at 10am I had a Standards Australia meeting (also via Zoom), to follow-up from the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in February. We had the usual administrative business, and I went through the technical report I wrote summarising the discussions and events of the international meeting. It went okay, although I had to pause a few times for coughing, which is still an issue as I recover from the illness.

At lunch I went to pick up a weekly grocery shop from the supermarket. And then in the afternoon I had three ethics classes in a row. I managed okay, but again, needing to pause to cough a few times. The cough is really quite annoying. It comes and goes throughout the day – sometimes I have a long period of coughing and feel awful, and then I it settles down a bit and doesn’t bother me for a while.

Today was similar, with the coughing fading in and out during the day. I went for a walk with my wife and Scully to the Naremburn bakery and had a cinnamon scroll for morning tea, which was really delicious. On the way home it rained, and became fairly heavy. We’d taken umbrellas, but forgotten Scully’s raincoat, so she got soaked, and when we got home we had to towel her off and give her a blow dry.

I spent much of today writing new comics for Irregular Webcomic! I’ve had two weeks of no new strips after the buffer rain out a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m planning to photograph this new batch tomorrow morning and have them ready for Monday.

I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner tonight – which is the first proper dinner for both of us that we’ve had for some time, as my wife hasn’t felt up to eating much since she got COVID as well, but she’s feeling better now.

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COVID day 7

I feel mostly better today, after a better night’s sleep. The last thing is this lingering throat tightness and coughing, which is pretty bad. It’s difficult talking for long without breaking into coughing.

Today I did some real work though. I had to write a report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in February, for Standards Australia, ahead of our follow-up national meeting on Friday. I’d intended to write it last week, but got cut short by COVID. The meeting was to be held in person in the city, but the project manager contacted me to suggest moving it to Zoom, which I agreed to.

In between writing parts of that report, I went for a walk with my wife (who is feeling a bit better today too) and Scully, trying to beat the heavy rain that fell most of the afternoon.

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ISO meeting day 3, and more rain

The ISO meeting today was mostly administrative cleanup, going through action items and minutes, but there were two technical discussion on potential new standards that we may want to develop, based on submissions from the Italian and Spanish national standards bodies. The Italian one is the tripod strength one they proposed a couple of meetings ago, and which we need to figure out how to handle. The Spanish proposal is for a standard for machine vision cameras, and we decided that sounds like something we should be doing, so we’re encouraging that too. The side benefits of these are the hope that Italy and Spain will join out committee as full members, and hopefully host meetings in their countries some time in the future.

We had a lot of rain overnight. I mentioned last night that we’d had 20 mm of rain. By morning that total had increased to over 50 mm. And we had another 15 mm during the day today. I took Scully out for a brief walk during a break in the ISO meeting, when I thought the rain had eased off for a while, but we got caught in a heavy shower. There was news about flash flooding across Sydney and a lot of trees down, cutting roads and power lines.

But the good news is that today was much cooler than the run of very warm days we’ve been having. They haven’t been hot – it has most definitely not been a hot summer, but it’s been hovering around 30°C every day for weeks now. So today’s 22°C was a welcome respite.

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