I realised why I didn’t seem to have anything to write yesterday. I’d completely forgotten that I’d woken up with an alarm just before 3:00 am, to join the second day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting. They started a full day at 9 am California time, which meant the early start for me here, joining in via web conference.
It was the first day of technical sessions. We discussed standards on:
- Depth Cameras — Proposed definitions for “depth camera”, “ground truth” in the context of depth camera measurement, and “flat field” as a 3D structure for calibration. And going through expert comments on the first draft of the standard.
- Skin Tone — Converting a technical committee report on more diverse and representative skin tone patches on camera test charts into an ISO technical report. There was some technical discussion of principal components analysis of various skin tone databases, which produced some unexpected results due to differences in illumination specifications. We agreed to proceed with the project and assigning an ISO number.
- Opto-electronic Conversion Function — This is a review of an existing standard to reconfigure a test chart to avoid camera flare issues contaminating results.
- HDR Best Practices — A follow-up to the recent HDR standardisation work, to outline user workflows and implementer recommendations for consistent handling of HDR images.
- Photo with Associated Media — Initial work on a new standard to define formats for things such as Apple’s LivePhoto, a photo with an attached video clip. We want this to be general, so the attached media could be anything and represent a wide range of auxiliary information relevant to the photo. There was discussion of making this compatible with the HDR gain map standard also being developed.
- DNG — Adobe’s Digital Negative format has now been published as an ISO standard, and now we’re looking to extend it to add new useful features in a version 2.
- HDR Readouts — An expert showed the problems with existing HDR UI controls for shooting HDR in scientific contexts. Hasselblad’s Phocus software displays the same HDR files differently to Adobe Lightroom, with no consistency between the UI tone mapping controls to be able to display the image the same. So standardisation is really needed here to enable scientific work in capturing HDR images.
The meeting ended at 11:00 am here in Sydney, giving me the afternoon to do other stuff, mainly university image processing report marking.
Today I skipped the first technical session of day 3 of the ISO meeting and only got up at 5:00 am, giving me an extra two hours sleep. The topics today:
- Image Information Capacity — The technical session I skipped. This is on developing a standard to measure image fidelity using Shannon information theory metrics. I’ll catch the important points in the meeting minutes.
- Angle Dependent Flare — Not much progress on this one as the project leader has been busy handing over the CEO role of his company to a new person. There was an experiment result presentation by another researcher.
- Low Light Performance with Hand Shake — Psychophysical experiments are continuing to determine suitable performance thresholds for the standard.
- Resolution — A revision to fix some issues and add new information.
- Vocabulary — Another revision to add new photography term definitions.
- Systematic reviews — We discussed five standards that are up for systematic review, and for which a country voted to revise. Two had proposals for additions, while the other three are still awaiting submissions.
I finished a bit early today, as the people physically present in Cupertino ended the day with a demonstration of HDR displays and image rendering, which didn’t translate to watching over a web conference.
I finished my marking of the student image processing assignments. And then I finally had the rest of the day free!…
To start packing books into boxes and hauling them down to the garage, in preparation for the repainting in just over a week. I’d planned to be doing that during this week, but was so busy with other things that I only started today. I got seven large plastic storage crates from the garage and filled them all with books. Well, I left some space, because they are big and when full of books I wouldn’t have been able to move them at all. With seven boxes full to as much as I dared, I’ve almost cleaned out one large bookcase. There are still two shelves of small paperbacks, and then there’s the other bookcase which hasn’t been touched yet.
Tomorrow we’ll go to the hardware store and buy some cardboard moving boxes to temporarily store the rest of the books, and also for our clothes, as we have a built-in wardrobe, which the painters are going to be painting inside.
Phew!