standards – dangermouse.net

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 4; D&D night; marking day

Friday was the last day of the IOS Photography Standards meeting. We had one technical session on camera image information capacity. The goal of this project is to come up with measures that can be calculated from the pixel statistic that reflect how well the image supports machine vision tasks such as object detection to be performed. This is a very different measure from image quality for humans. The use case is similar in fact to the machine vision standard I mentioned on Day 1, but here we’re using measures such as the Shannon information capacity.

After that we had the closing administrative sessions, going over action items, finalising plans for the next meeting, adopting resolutions, and paying thanks to the various organisers and hosts (which includes me this time!).

I came home about 2:30pm and got straight into housecleaning to prepare for the Dungeons & Dragons game in the evening. I vacuumed, cleaned the shower and bathroom, and had a shower to freshen up. Friends arrived at 6pm and we played the next session of our current adventure. Much fun was had, and we finished up around 10:30.

Today I got up, had breakfast, went for a 5k run. I didn’t do as fast as last weekend. It was warmer and more humid, so it was a bit tougher going. After a shower I made a new Darths & Droids strip for tomorrow.

Then I got stuck into marking student assignments for the university image processing course. I have seven groups to mark, and got through three this afternoon. Hopefully I can polish off the last four tomorrow.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 3

This morning I dropped Scully off at doggy daycare again. They were going to deliver her back at home in the evening after my wife got home from work. Then I hopped a train into the city. The weather was lovely today, mild and sunny.

The ISO Photography Standards meeting today went through a bunch of different technical topics, covering: camera readouts and controls for HDR photography, camera memory model, digital camera pixel specifications, ISO DNG file format, low light performance with hand-held camera shake, depth metrology, image flare, and image stabilisation. We also had some additional discussion on the HDR topics covered yesterday, because there had been a failure to reach consensus on some issues. This was a… lively session.

After the meeting I headed home, where Scully still had not been delivered by the doggy daycare place. Then my wife got a message saying that she’d been delivered to her work! They’d messed up the address, and then left her with some of my wife’s co-workers, rather than try to contact us. So she requested they pick her up and bring her back home, but she also left to walk all the way back to work in case they took too long, while I stayed home in case she arrived here. I called up to find out what was going on and they said the delivery driver was a few suburbs away and because of the major crash on the Bridge traffic was banked up everywhere and it would be at least an hour before they could get back to my wife’s work. So lucky she left to go back there.

She arrived and fortunately Scully was safe and sound with her co-workers. But she had no harness or lead, and so couldn’t walk home with Scully! So I had to drive down and pick them both up.

I had a call with the doggy daycare and they were very apologetic, saying they’d already spoken to the delivery driver about leaving a dog with someone who wasn’t the owner. That absolutely never should have happened, no matter what the co-workers said, without contacting and checking directly with us. So it was all a bit stressful because we didn’t know for sure that Scully was safe for half an hour.

To end on a more positive note, some photos I took the past few days while on break from the standards meeting. First, the view from our meeting room window, with a coveted Sydney Harbour water view:

Jacaranda trees beginning to flower at Circular Quay:

Some of Sydney’s old and new architecture:

The Opera House with ferries crossing in front:

And the Art Gallery:

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 2

I got up this morning and after breakfast headed into the city for day 2 of the ISO Photography Standards meeting. The weather was better today, with a bit of sun poking through the clouds, though it go greyer in the middle of the day. Late in the day the sun came out again and it was a beautiful early evening.

The technical discussion today was all about high dynamic range (HDR) image representation, covering aspects of how to specify conversion to standard dynamic range (SDR) displays or print renderings, how to edit HDR files that contain metadata specifying the creator’s artistic intention on different display media, and so on. It was very technical and not my area of specialty, so a bit less interesting to me than tomorrow’s other technical topics.

One interesting point that came up about converting HDR images for SDR display: If your software/hardware can’t render the HDR content adequately then there is a potential privacy or security issue because users might then share an HDR image that contains visible data that they can’t see on their display, and so would be unaware of. This is the sort of consideration that we have to think about when devising standards to deal with this sort of stuff.

We broke early at 4:30pm because I’d organised a behind-the-scenes tour of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We met there at 5:30, allowing some delegates time to drop gear at their hotel rooms. We were met by a staff member who is also on the Australian photography standards committee, and she showed us around the gallery photo labs, demonstrating equipment used to digitise artworks and telling us about their program of photography and digitisation, the unique challenges they face, and so on.

After this we separated, with many of the international delegates taking the opportunity to explore the Art Gallery (which is open until 10pm on Wednesdays). But I headed home on the train, getting home a bit before 8pm.

My wife had already had some dinner, so I cooked up some mushrooms on toast for a simple dinner.

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 1

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:

Late and busy Monday before ISO meeting

Phew. It’s late. I did my last six ethics classes today. In between I packaged up some more Magic cards to send off to a buyer. I had to go to the post office, but a big thunderstorm broke over Sydney mid-afternoon, the only time I had spare time. So I drove up to the post office with Scully instead of walking through the rain.

I made pizza dough, to be topped with stuff for dinner. And a new Darths & Droids comic for tomorrow night.

And I did some prep work for the ISO Photography Standards meeting which begins here in Sydney tomorrow. We’ll have about 30 delegates from around the world attending and I’m on hosting duties. We’ll be meeting 9-5 for the next few days. So I’ve cancelled ethics classes for the coming seven days to allow me to do this.

And on top of this, I have to start marking the first assessment task for the university image processing course! It’s going to be a super busy week.

New content today:

Ticking off many tasks

I had several things I wanted/needed to get done today. I started making a Darths & Droids comic, from a script we worked on last night (with my friends online), ready for tomorrow’s update. Then I made Irregular Webcomic! strips for tonight and tomorrow.

With those out of the way, I had some tasks to do for photography standards work. I went through the list of currently open ballots for international standards, recommending voting positions for the Australian committee, and emailing the committee members about those.

Then I had to do some mandatory training exercises for the university, so that they will pay me for the lecturing and tutoring work I’m doing. I had four new courses to complete, about data security, fraud, corruption, and remote working. One course said it took 10 minutes to complete, but it had about 5 or 6 videos to watch, each of them three minutes long! It took me 25 minutes to complete that one. The others had more reasonable time estimates. Overall I spent about an hour and a half on them.

I kind of wonder, has anyone in the world ever done a mandatory training course and then failed the quiz at the end so many times that they actually had to resign or be dismissed because they couldn’t complete the mandatory course?

After that I went through the lecture material for tomorrow’s image processing lecture, to make sure I knew all the work and could explain it to the students. I had to refresh myself on the Canny edge detection algorithm, for about the tenth time in my life. But having to lecture about it to students tomorrow will hopefully mean that I never forget the details of the algorithm again!

This evening I had three ethics classes in a row. We’re having fun discussing Sayings. a friend of mine suggested using some foreign sayings and found a good one in Swedish:

Att glida på en räkmacka.

Translated literally into English, this means:

To slide in on a shrimp sandwich.

I told the kids this and then asked them to guess what the saying meant metaphorically. I got some wildly varied answers, including:

To do something dangerous, like sliding on something slippery
To be lucky
To make something delicious
To be lazy, like sliding off your couch
To do something ridiculous

My own guess, before I knew the correct answer was “to make an unwelcome appearance”. But it turns out the real meaning in Swedish metaphor is “to succeed without having to work at it”. This is a really fun topic, at least with kids who get into the spirit of it. I had one class where they were all a bit reserved, and nobody wanted to guess in case they got it wrong.

Oh, my wife got to ride the new Metro train today, from the station near her work to the one near our home. A day before I get to try it to go to the university tomorrow!

And the weather today was absolutely gorgeous! We got up to 26°C. I don’t think this winter has any real cold left in it. It’ll be a touch cooler the next few days, but then next week we’re forecast to have a run of 25°C, 28°C, and 26°C. It was so nice going out today without a jumper or jacket on.

New content today:

Standards, Lego, games

This morning I had to move an ethics class to make room for a Standards Australia Photography committee meeting. I’ve been serving as the chair of this committee for 9 years come December, and the tenure limit is 9 years, so we had to have a discussion about finding someone else to chair the committee. This shouldn’t be a lot of work, as I confirmed with our committee manager that I can continue to attend the ISO international meetings and compile reports, while someone else chairs the committee. That’s 90% or more of the work involved. So hopefully someone will nominate to serve as the new chair while I continue to do the work that I want to do. if nobody does, then I don’t know if the committee will be forced to fold, leaving me unable to do the work any more.

Here’s stage 22 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set build. It fills out the upper floor with a cool looking wizard’s chamber or something, with books and candles and a cool skull.

Tonight is online games night with my friends. My wife is out having dinner with her friends, so I just walked with Scully up to the fish and chips shop to get some dinner there. We’re currently playing the quantum trick-taking game Cat in the Box.

New content today:

Tradition, innovation, and standards

This morning I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics class on the topic of “Tradition vs Innovation”. I decided to include the story about how Kodak in the 1970s and 80s suppressed digital camera technology by buying up patents and not developing the tech themselves, in order to keep their photographic film business profitable. Of course eventually other companies developed alternative digital technology and the genie got let out of the bottle, resulting in a rapid uptake of digital cameras and the collapse of the film market, and ultimately the bankruptcy of Kodak. I use this to frame several questions about the conflict between old methods and new innovations.

In one of my classes tonight on this topic, I had a new student, from Saudi Arabia, my first from that country. That brings my total list of students’ countries to 54. Unfortunately he was a bit too young for the class, and I think overwhelmed by the discussion. I had to advise his parent to remove him from the class afterwards, and maybe try again in a year or so.

I also worked today on writing up a form to propose a new revision of an ISO photography standard to be adopted as an Australian standard. I was supposed to do this asap after the last meeting we had, but hadn’t got around to it. Since our next Australian committee meeting is on Friday, I thought I better do it!

Today was again very cold, but the rain held off for the most part during daylight. Scully and I did cop a light sprinkle while out for a long lunchtime walk. But the clouds opened up around sunset and now as I type this it’s pouring down out there. Not looking forward to taking Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

New content today:

Virtual New York meeting: day 4

Thankfully the final day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting is mostly administrative and usually ends a bit early. There was one technical session to start, before moving into admin. During a break I had a piece of apple strudel which we’d got as a take-away dessert from the restaurant where we had dinner last night.

The meeting wound up around 4:30am, and I crawled into bed to finally get some sleep. I ended up sleeping until around 9:30 before I got up.

I did some easy, relaxing things today. I built another stage of my Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. I also did one yesterday, so I have two stages worth to show off. Here is stage 13, which starts building a new section of the diorama:

This section is a baseplate with some rudiments of walls and the beginning of a staircase. There’s also some weird pink plant growth in places. And candles with green flames!

Then today stage 14 added a very cool spiral staircase up to the first floor and the beginning of more stairs going up further.

There are two doors into this area. And I think that small round thing in the corner is a well.

My wife went out today to see Death of a Salesman on stage in the city. So I had the afternoon with Scully at home. The weather was very cold and grey, with intermittent rain, so not fun for going outside at all. Sydney only reached a maximum of 13.8°C today, which is about as cold as it gets in winter.

For dinner I made spicy chick peas in tomato sauce, served over rice. I made this specifically so I could use up some remaining spinach before it went off. And I forgot to put the spinach in! Everything was cooked and ready to serve, but I chopped up the spinach and threw it in the sauce and stirred it through. Fortunately spinach only takes about 10 seconds to cook.

Oh, and I took this photo yesterday, of an old house on a street corner. Evidently the owner refused to sell to developers, and now a huge apartment tower complex is being built on both sides of the house. You can see the building work being down on the left and right – it’s the same building site, wrapping around the back of the house.

Time to get a full night’s sleep tonight!!

New content today:

Virtual New York meeting: day 3

I stayed up for the full hours of the ISO Photography Standards meeting, from 11pm, although it finished a little early, around 5:30am instead of 7am. I crawled into bed, but didn’t get any sleep since my wife got up at 6:15 to go to the gym before work.

I had breakfast and then took Scully out for a morning walk. During the day I worked slowly on some Darths & Droids writing, trying to use the opportunity of a day without ethics classes to get ahead. But I was tired so it was hard to think properly.

I had to pack up some stuff to send in the mail and decided to take Scully up to the post office and get an early lunch because I was hungry, and also because there was rain incoming and I wanted to beat it. I had a snack during the night to keep me going – a Napoli biscuit that I’d bought from Maggio’s with my lunch. But being awake all night must burn a lot of energy because I had my regular breakfast and then was hungry again by 11am.

The rain hit soon after lunch and set in for the rest of the day. It’s still coming down now, close to midnight, with almost 60 mm having fallen.

I tried to nap from about 2pm to get some sleep, but don’t think I did any more than lie there trying to fall asleep, despite being very tired.

My wife tried to contact me to pick her up from work, but I wasn’t paying attention to my phone until it actually rang. I got up and drove over there, picking her up in the rain. We drove over to another suburb to pick up a new pair of glasses for her, then came back to get our grocery order, which I’d put in online for pickup in the evening instead of the usual morning. We decided to take the opportunity of being parked at the supermarket to go to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Then we picked up the shopping and came home for an early evening.

I had a shower to warm up and then hopped into bed by 8:30pm to try and get any sleep at all before getting up again at 10:30 for tonight’s ISO meeting session. Thankfully it’s the last day of the meeting, and should wrap up a bit early so I can crawl into bed in the wee hours again.

New content today: