Tag: standards

ISO meeting day 2, and a big storm

Day 2 of the ISO Photography standards meeting was all technical discussions. We talked about standards for measuring low light performance, specifying camera-related vocabulary definitions, defining transformation maps for converting between standard and high dynamic range images, updating definitions of camera technical specification to handle new technologies, measuring the information-theoretic capacity of camera images and systems, and measuring autofocus performance.

One of the interesting quotes from the discussion concerned the autofocus standard. The authors wanted to allow measurement of autofocus under conditions that simulate being held by hand – with the camera shaking and wobbling due to hand unsteadiness. In a formal testing situation, you need to simulate this with a robotic device that is programmed to shake the camera in the same manner as a human hand. Another expert said that it seemed weird to have this, rather than just using a tripod to hold the camera, since we already have a different standard for measuring imaging performance when hand-held. The author responded that (my paraphrasing): Almost 100% of photos taken are hand-held, so requiring a tripod for a performance test is somewhat perverse.

Another interesting concern that was raised came about because of the recent explosion in AI algorithms. Someone pointed out that we have standards for measuring image quality that work by having the camera take a photo of a standardised test chart, and then comparing the quality of the image to an ideal reproduction of the chart, noting where the image from the camera is degraded. This reflects the real world performance, since photos of scenes will be degraded in the same way. But someone pointed out that digital cameras are increasingly using image processing to improve image quality, and soon no doubt they’ll be using AI algorithms. And if an AI algorithm knows the standard test chart it can recognise when you try to take a photo of one… and output an image which is a perfect reproduction of the test chart. So when you take a photo of a test chart, the measured “camera performance” will be absolutely perfect, but this will not reflect the camera’s actual performance when photographing a scene.

This is something we actually have to think about, to try to design a performance test that can’t be cheated in this way. There are options, such as randomising the test charts or procedurally generating them, but this all requires very careful design and testing. So we have plenty of work ahead of us in the next few years!

Tonight while teaching my new ethics class on Exploration, there was a big thunderstorm. Lots of lightning and heavy rain and wind. We had 20 mm of rain in a couple of hours, and no doubt there’ll have been some flash flooding and probably some trees down across the city. No problem here, thankfully.

New content today:

ISO meeting day 1, and a new semester of Data Engineering

Last night when I wrote my blog entry, I thought I’d be getting up at 06:30 to start the day with the ISO Photography Standards meeting at 07:00. It’s in Tokyo, and that’s 2 hours different in time zone to Sydney… however just before bed I suddenly realised I’d done the time conversion wrong! The 9am start in Tokyo was actually 11am in Sydney not 7am!

This meant two things: (1) I didn’t have to get up so early and rush through breakfast. (2) With the finishing time also 4 hours later than I’d thought, the meeting now ended at 7pm, rather than 3pm. But the Data Engineering course I am teaching started at 3pm, in at the university. I’d planned to miss just the last hour of the ISO meeting and head in on the train at 2pm. But now that meant I’d be missing the last five hours of the ISO meeting!

Ugh… this was a bit of a mess, but there’s nothing I could do about it. I joined the ISO meeting at 11:00 and had to make apologies that I’d be leaving after just 3 hours. I was there for the opening administrative session, but missed most of the technical discussion sessions in the afternoon. It’s a shame, but couldn’t be helped.

Today was the very first day of the university semester. The class began at 3pm, and I noticed the students all sat clustered very close together in the large lecture room. And 5 minutes before the starting time, before the lecturer had even said anything, a deathly hush fell over the room as they all waited for the lecture to being. This is a first year course, so today was the first day of university for all of these students. And the lecturer said it was quite possibly the very first university lecture for many of them. Ah, that initial naiveté! It’ll wear off quickly, probably.

The lecture was good and the students were all listening and concentrating. It was introductory material for the course, the assessment methods, a demo of the Matlab software package which we’ll be using during the course, and the material I wrote on ethics of data science for last year’s course revamp. We finished a little early. One disadvantage of the course running 3-6pm is that it ends in peak hour, so the trains heading home are crowded. So I sat with the lecturer for a bit and we caught up on news since we’d last seen each other at the end of last year’s Image Processing course, before we headed for the trains.

New content today:

A busy morning, a hot run

This morning I had an online meeting (via MS Teams) for ISO Photography Standards – specifically an ad-hoc technical meeting for investigating accuracy standards for depth measurement cameras. This is one of the new projects we’re working on and we’re in the experimental phase, gathering information to try to develop standards for measuring depth and resolution accuracy of such cameras. Unfortunately I can’t contribute with any actual experimental lab-work, but I’m in the ad-hoc group (essentially a technical subcommittee) because I have experience with and interest in these devices. The meeting was 08:30-09:30 my time, so convenient, but it ate up some of the morning.

After that my wife suggested we go for a long walk to the Naremburn bakery for morning tea. Sure! So we did that, taking Scully for a walk. They had a nice looking pastry filled with custard and sultanas, topped with flaked almonds, so I tried that.

When we got home (and this is a 4.5 km walk), I immediately changed and went out for a run. An I decided to do a long one, 5k! It was approaching noon by now, but I wanted to get it done then rather than later in the afternoon when it would just be hotter. It was an exhausting run.

I had to be home and showered and have lunch before my second game design class at 2pm – but the student didn’t show up. I’m going to have to contact the parent and arrange some make-up class time.

Then this evening was three more ethics/critical thinking classes on the UFOs topic. Two of them were good, with the kids demonstrating good critical thinking skills. But the first one I had three kids and they were all bouncing alien theories off each other the whole time, for every question! It was… well, interesting. At least I hope they had fun!

New content today:

Standards meeting and gaming

This morning I had a meeting at Standards Australia, the follow-up to the recent ISO international standards meeting on Photography that I attended in early November. But first I had to drop Scully off at doggie daycare, and then head into town on the train.

The meeting was routine and not especially notable, except that we had a new project manager from Standards Australia taking care of the administrative stuff. This is the third manager we’ve had in the past three meetings – the previous one only lasted one meeting. I assume because she got moved onto some other committees, not because there’s anything particularly nasty about ours. In fact I think our committee is an easy one for new staff to get used to the drill, as we are fairly consensus-based and non-contentious. There are other Australian standards committees who are much more tricky to handle, as they have representatives from competing companies.

After the meeting, I headed to the game store in town to pick up a couple of board games I’d ordered: the new edition of Camel Up, and Camel Up: Off Season. The guy looked for the games in the area set aside for customer orders to be picked up, but didn’t find them. After some rummaging around out the back he returned with a copy of Off Season, but no Camel Up. He said there’d obviously been a mix-up and a copy hadn’t been set aside for me. So I’ll have to go back another time to get it.

Immediately back home I went to pick up Scully from the daycare. She really loves spending time there, and she is super tired after spending a few hours playing with other dogs.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’ve played some games of Jaipur, Jump Drive, and Just One, and will continue with some others as the night progresses.

New content today:

Reporting and teleporting

This morning I worked on my report for the Photography Standards meeting I attended at the start of November. I finished it by lunch time and sent it off to Standards Australia. Next week we have a meeting where I will go through the report with various Australian experts from different institutions, universities, and so on. We’ll also be discussing hosting an international meeting in Sydney in October 2024. I’m hoping we can get that happening, as it would be good to have the international delegates come here again.

I had one more class on the ethics of teleportation today. This is a really fun class, because the kids are really being made to think about strange things that they’d never considered before. Today, of the four kids in the class, when I asked how teleportation would change the world, three of them thought of fairly obvious useful things, while one kid kept coming up with evil uses such as sending bombs, or weapons, or sneaking into secure places. Another kid said, “What if someone appears in your bathroom!!”

After that class I had some admin tasks to do on Outschool. I needed to post in all the classes that I’m taking some time off over Christmas, letting parents and students know the last class date for the year and when classes will resume in January. And then I sent messages to the parents of eight former students who were older/more mature, and invited them to enrol in my brand new class for January, Critical and Ethical Thinking for ages 13-15. I created a coupon for any returning students to use for a free first lesson.

I took Scully on a couple of walks, and I spent some time this afternoon going through and editing photos from my trip to Europe in June, adding some to my travel diary. I still have several more days’ worth of photos to edit from that trip. This was our hotel in Würzburg:

Hotel Goldenes Faß, Würzburg

Oh, and today was the first day of summer here, but you’d hardly notice it, as it was chilly and overcast all day. The Bureau of Meteorology released a summary of the spring just ended, and it was unusually cold and wet. Sydney had almost double the average rainfall for the months August-October. In terms of average temperature, it was the coolest spring since 2003, and in terms of the maximum temperatures, it was the coldest spring on record – i.e. the lowest maximum temperatures ever recorded. This is the effects of a third La Niña in succession, combined with a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which reinforces the cooler/wetter effects. They’re predicting our summer will be unusually cool and wet as well. For the third summer in a row.

New content today:

Photography Standards meeting day 3

I was up at 4am for the third morning in a row for my ISO standards meeting. We had another technical session on camera pixel specifications, which is a new addition to camera definitions that was raised at the previous meeting. After that we did the administrative stuff of recording action items and resolutions and so on. The meeting finished around 10am, leaving me the rest of the day.

I was pretty tired though, so didn’t get a lot done. I went for a walk with my wife and Scully for lunch at the bakery, where I had a mushroom pie, followed by a lemon meringue tart.

For dinner tonight I made potato, rosemary, and feta pizza, with pesto sauce rather than tomato.

Potato, rosemary, feta pizza

New content today:

Photography Standards meeting day 2

I was up at 4am again this morning for the second day of my ISO Photography Standards meeting, dialling into Apple in Cupertino via Webex. Today we had technical sessions all day, including:

  • tripod safety strength;
  • autofocus repeatability;
  • a proposal from a guy related to some of the high dynamic range stuff we discussed yesterday, suggesting additional applications to office printer equipment;
  • image flare;
  • depth metrology;
  • and a proposal for a new work item on a standard relating to measuring the Shannon information theoretic information capacity of photographic images, for the context of determining usability of cameras for machine vision.

There was some very interesting discussion and I was diligently taking notes throughout, so I can report at the follow-up meeting for Australian experts.

After the meeting ended around 11am my time, I took Scully out for a long walk. We walked out to the long headland where the ferry wharf is and I had her chase and retrieve a tennis ball for a bit to run around, and then we walked home again.

Some photos I took on the way. A framed view of the city through an old sandstone house’s veranda:

House with a view

View over the local harbour swimming area (fenced off in the lower part of the photo):

Baths view

The local creek (view looking down from the bridge above):

Berrys Creek

This afternoon I had a couple more ethics classes on Secrets. And then for dinner my wife and I drove over to the Thai restaurant that we go to sometimes, a couple of suburbs over. Given I’ve been up at 4am two days in a row now, I was pretty tired. And given I had breakfast and lunch an hour or two early each (since I got up so early) I was really hungry by dinner time. So it was nice to have a tasty meal that I didn’t have to cook.

And here’s Scully, relaxing with some of her toys:

Scully and toys

New content today:

A discussion of rain forecasts

I didn’t post an entry yesterday because my evening was full of three ethics classes, followed by me very quickly heading to bed so that I could get as much sleep as possible before getting up at 3:50am for the beginning of my ISO Standards meeting this morning.

First up though, I mentioned a while ago about how the Bureau of Meteorology recently changed the way they quote rain forecasts. The new example I gave there was the mathematically bizarre/useless forecast:

50% chance of at least 0 mm of rain.

Well, that’s not all of the mathematical weirdness. A few days back I saw this in my official BoM app and took a screenshot:

rain forecast screenshot

In text, that says:

75% (high) chance of no rain.
50% (medium) chance of at least 1 mm.
25% (low) chance of at least 2 mm.

Now… if there’s 75% chance of no rain, but 50% chance of at least 1 mm… that’s 125%, right. Probabilities do not work that way! Then a few days later my friends and I had this discussion on our Discord chat, where one of my friends attempted to explain – to the best of his understanding – what the actual heck the BoM is trying to say:

forecast discussion

We are smart people, with degrees in maths and science, and we can barely figure out what the BoM is actually trying to say with their new style of rainfall forecasts. The old style was perfectly fine, yet they gave the reason for changing to the new style that the old one was “too confusing”. Yeeesh. 🙄

Anyway, on to today’s activities. Got up at 3:50am as I mentioned, and fired up Webex for my Photography Standards meeting. The first part was administrative stuff, and in future meeting planning I talked about the possibility of hosting a meeting here in Sydney in October 2024. I’d really love it if I can get that organised and happening, as the previously planned meeting for Sydney in 2019 was shifted to Germany at the last minute due to a travel clash with another conference that many of the delegates wanted to attend in Europe (they didn’t want to have to fly from Australia directly to Europe for some reason – I dunno… it’s only 24-25 hours travel time. Wimps.).

Then we discussed technical projects, including the adoption of Adobe’s DNG image file format as an ISO standard (which was reported publicly back in 2018 – these things move slowly sometimes); measuring performance of non-optical image stabilisation methods; and defining high dynamic range and wide colour gamut still image file formats.

After the meeting ended at 11:30am my time, I walked to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, as she’d taken her to work this morning so everyone in her (wife’s) new office could meet her (Scully). I had some lunch nearby and then Scully and I walked home via a roundabout route to get some extra steps in.

For dinner tonight I made mushroom and spinach omelettes. My wife’s turned out perfectly, but I didn’t get a photo of it before she ate it. Mine folded a little messily:

Mushroom spinach omelette

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Gearing up for early rising

I have an ISO Photography Standards meeting to attend this week. The physical meeting is at Apple Park in Cupertino, but I am not travelling there. I really did not relish the thought of being in the USA on this mid-term election day, and with COVID still being such an issue.

So I am attending via Webex meeting (kind of like Zoom, for those of you who don’t know it). The issue of course is that the meeting runs from 9am to 5pm, California time. Which is 4am to midday here in Sydney. So on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning I am going to have to get up about 3:45am and get my brain into gear for highly technical meetings. Since my sleep schedule lately has been fairly late nights of around 11pm, waking around 7am, this is going to be tricky and not fun.

To help adjust, my plan is to get to bed a bit earlier in the preceding days, but given tonight I have an online ethics class running from 9:00-9:45pm, I’m not going to get to bed much earlier tonight, by the time I take Scully out for a final toilet before bed, brush my teeth, and unwind and read in bed a little until I get sleepy.

In other news, I was switched to Duolingo’s new user interface the other day, and it’s horrible. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) summed it up in this tweet thread:

Transcript for when/if Twitter goes offline:

@duolingo just got switched to the new version. is there anyway to undo progress? I tested out of a unit but realized I shouldn’t’ve, so I’d been going back and pushing 1* lessons to 5. But in the new version they’re all maxed out at fully completed and I’m lost lol

@duolingo Please, it’s unusable. I keep flunking lessons and there’s no clue as to where the material I skipped is, because now every past lesson looks the same, and it says I’ve fully passed them all. I freely admit my hubris, I’m just tired of all these petards hoisting me

I guess the new UI might be okay for new learners, but for where I’m at with Italian, having completed the course and using the practice reminders for out-of-date skills to reinforce those, it’s impossible. I have no idea what skills I need to practise, or where to find specific grammar or vocabulary in the new “learning path”. It’s basically made it useless for my purposes any more.

So I was prompted today to look at some new method of reinforcing and learning Italian. I decided to check YouTube, and found this channel, Italy Made Easy. I watched one of the intermediate level conversation videos and found it about the right level for me – I could follow most of it, with a bit of help from the subtitles, and also learnt a few things. So this seems promising and aI’ll try to convert my Duolingo time to YouTube time every day from now on.

My new ethics classes tonight are on the topic of Secrets, and I spent this morning writing the lesson outline. This seems to be a good and interesting lesson so far, with two classes down already.

New content today:

The scientific method

I started my new weekly ethics topic with three classes today, on the scientific method. I’m a lot happier with this topic than the last one on digital assets, which I felt was a bit too technical for some of the kids, and they didn’t really enjoy it as much. This one feels better. It’s really more about critical thinking, but since my class is advertised as “Critical and Ethical Thinking”, that’s not a bad thing.

It was supposed to rain here today, being stormy, but there was barely a sprinkle. We may have more move in overnight. The next few days are supposed to be very rainy. We’ll see.

Mostly otherwise I worked on comics, and did my 2.5k run, and took Scully for a walk.

Oh, and I got the agenda and schedule for the next ISO Photography Standards meeting, which is being held at Apple headquarters in Cupertino in November. I’ve decided not to fly over to California this time, but to attend via web conference. That means starting at 4am (9am in California), for three days in a row. It won’t be pleasant, but at this point I prefer that to flying to the United States, given COVID and the political situation over there.

New content today: