Mostly color perception

Your portrait

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:44:00 GMT

One of the American strengths in the global economy is the demographic knowledge about itself. No other country publishes high quality statistical data as fast as the US, and nowhere else have companies such intimate knowledge of their customers. Nevertheless, HP's blogs are subject to very stringent privacy rules, and we know very little about You, our reader.

True, our Mostly Color blog readers are shy and prefer to comment via email, but not everybody comments, so we know very little about You. The only data we receive is a spreadsheet with the minimal data necessary to administer our performance appraisals.

Knowledge of the customer — or reader in this case — is important to decide which of the facts we see when we look out of our window we should blog about; after all, we are promising to divulge information that allows you to take action and make commitments. So I threw the April data we just got into pro Fit to see what we can interpolate.

The first statistical tidbit is that you are not just reading our blog as we write it. In fact, although we just wrote a few posts, 146 pages were visited. By the way, a visit is the collection of the pages you visit during a session. For example, if you start from a page and then follow links to previous posts, it counts only as one visit. I am looking at visits instead of views, so I can limit the data to the posts you where interested in first and ignore deambulations.

The first plot tells me that there are some posts that are wildly popular. Considering this is a more arcane blog reporting on news like non-local realism, compared to for example The Digital Mindset Blog reporting on Gwen Stefani, this is a surprising data point. Hmm, Nathan posted An On-Line Color Thesaurus half a year ago on October 29, 2007 and still had 1392 visits last month; I guess that is what would be called an evergreen.

The time on the ordinate is in minutes, so pages with zero time are the ones you dismissed after a cursory glance. Fittingly, more time was spent on the more popular pages. There are quite a few visits to pages read for more than two minutes, which tells us, that the level is about right for our audience.

Interpolation allows us to get a little more out of the data. First lets us categorize it. I should have taken the tags on each post, but that would have taken me too much time, so I just quickly make up nine categories and get

The color on the legend at the right is the reading time in minutes, and visits are the number of times a post was visited upon first reaching the blog. Yellow areas indicate were we hit your interests on the spot.

Posts on color science are most popular for diligent readers, with Nathan's tool posts hitting the jackpot. Surprising is the popularity of the trivia posts, where we mostly blogged about a particular color. We should do more of them.

The encouraging datum is that there are no categories that flopped, meaning that our eclecticism is in the correct ballpark for our readers. Actually, let me replot this with a linear scale and focussing on the posts with hundred or less visits, which are more the typical posts.

This confirms that each category has an attentive readership, mostly so the posts related to color science, hence the blog title is appropriate.

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ISCC/IS&T "Black and White" Meeting, Nov 2008

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:16:00 GMT

ISCC/IS&T 2008 Special Topics Meeting,
“Black and White Conference”
Saturday, November 15, 2008

The Black and White Conference will follow the 2008 IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference with a program devoted to the special challenges and solutions for black and white, two of the most important properties of a colored image. Evidence of recent interest in the blackness and whiteness of images and objects are the IDEAlliance Print Properties subcommittee on paper characterization, the SIS (Swedish Standards Institute) Workshop on the optical properties of paper, CIE Publication 163 on the Effect of Fluorescence in the Characterization of Imaging Media, and papers at recent Color Imaging Conferences.

Key topics at the meeting will include the measurement of white materials, three-color overprints versus true black, the impact of novel light sources on the rendition of colored images, very black materials, strategies for assessing black and white objects, and blackness preference.

The meeting is scheduled for Saturday, November 15, following Color Imaging Conference 16 in Portland, Oregon. Please submit abstracts to Ann Laidlaw at alaidlaw-at-xrite-dot-com.

A fresh view of lasers

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:03:00 GMT

We are all familiar with conventional lasers, where light is confined between two mirrors defining laser cavity modes and laser frequency. The light is trapped long enough for amplification by a gain medium (atomic vapor, solid, or dye) to be efficient. These lasers are in our CD and DVD ROMs and players, bar code readers, and the head stations that light up optical fiber.

Recently, progress in nanotechnology has brought us laser paint as a robust and inexpensive source of coherent light. These random lasers are representatives of nonlinear disordered optical media that are studied in the physics of disordered systems under non-equilibrium conditions.

Laser paint consists of a random aggregate of nano-particles which scatter light and have gain or are embedded in a background medium with gain. In a variety called diffuse random lasers (DRL) the diffusive escape of light is so rapid that such lasers exhibit no isolated resonances in the absence of gain.

DRLs are completely different animals from conventional lasers, and the standard laser theory explaining lasing in terms of Fabry-Pérot interferometers or etalons analogy cannot explain laser paint.

Recently Hakan Türeci of the ETH in Zurich and his collaborators have developed a theory able to treat the DRL rigorously and provide results on the lasing spectra, internal fields, and output intensities. In essence, they have developed a unified picture of laser physics.

By substituting the role of linear cavity resonances with a new set of modes, they found a simple analytical expression from which all of the properties of any laser structure can be derived, given a knowledge of the dielectric constant profile of the system together with the main parameters characterizing the amplifying material.

Their work could spark a new branch of nonlinear dynamics in which phenomena such as optical bistability or multistability could be explored in novel types of lasing structures. Read more on their web site.

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Aftermath: surviving psychopathy

Mon, 12 May 2008 19:35:00 GMT

As this blog's title suggests, we are not just writing about color perception. This is a good time to put some entropy in our blog. Last summer I reviewed a few books on psychopathy, which generated quite a bit of feedback email. Here is an update.

Very loosely I started with a Science magazine paper on contributors, slackers and quitters, and then moved over to a book with a perspective from a psychologist specializing in psychopath victims, Hare's classical Without Conscience, to the more more updated book on psychopaths in the next cubicle, and finally to a book taking a broader perspective in time and from neurosis to psychopathy. According to the blog traffic log, these posts are still of great interest, so I think I should give an update.

In the past 15 years we have learned a lot on the functioning of the brain, and there is strong evidence, that when the brain gets rewired from back to front during adolescence, in some people with a genetic predisposition the speech area does not get wired up to the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, preventing the development of emotions and of the conscience.

As described in Snakes in Suits, we are increasingly exposed to psychopaths at work. Yet, only few of us have access to an fMRI system at work and even when we do, it may not practical to scan the potential psychopaths in our lives. Since there is no test that can administered by us laymen and psychopaths are not required to wear a bell, we are confronted with the problem of having to deal with the psychopath's victims.

I received an email from a prominent researcher in this field, that a web site for people with psychopaths in their lives has been set up under the name Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy. It has several forums and a very useful Primer on Psychopathy by the foremost experts David Kosson and Robert Hare themselves, as well as a number of links to other resources.

If you think there might be a psychopath in your life, check this aftermath web site. If you know somebody who you think might be a victim, send them this link.

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World Wide Gamma

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:25:00 GMT

An experimental tool post to crowdsource the average 'gamma value' for the world wide web. To learn more about gamma you can read the FAQ and also the FQA by Charles Poynton.

Instructions
1. Use '+' and '-' buttons to make the corresponding patches above the buttons lighter or darker.
2. Create a visually equal spaced gray ramp from black on the left to white on the right. That is the jumps in lightness between neighbors should be roughly equal and the ramp should be getting progressively lighter.
3. Click on the 'Plot' button to see your results(black) plotted versus the world wide gamma(red).

&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;It's looks like your browser doesn't support iframe's. Click here to go directly to included content.&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; Notes
Yes this is actually getting an estimate of the World Wide Gamma at the same time that it is getting an estimate of the average lightness scaling of humans. The analysis will require some assumptions. Similarly the optional comments page after the results are plotted will be useful for further analyzing the data so if you have a few extra seconds please fill it out. Finally, once the data stabilizes some I will just provide it in tabular form as well. The actual World Wide Gamma is a moving target but the data will be informative for understanding nominal display properties for the web.

Note that users of older versions of Safari (ie 1.3.2) have reported that this post is not interactive, but it has been tested with newer versions of Safari (ie 3.1.1) and the post is functional.

Toyon Red

Thu, 01 May 2008 12:03:00 GMT

Terminal three of the San Francisco airport is currently hosting an exhibit on Catlinaware. These depression era ceramic products produced on Catalina island are quite striking. They were manufactured in a range of colors, including toyon red. The display about the glazes used for Catalinaware noted that in total nearly twenty different glazes were used, and many were inspired by the natural colors of the island.

Toyon red is then a deep reddish-orange, almost brown color, named for toyon, a local shrub. Toyon or Heteromeles arbutifolia is native to southwestern California and easy to spot with it's bright red berries. Looking around online it would seem that it is the leaves and wood that can be used to create a golden brown dye while the leaves and berries make a dark olive or black dye. The USDA symbol is HEAR5 and may be the inspiration for the name Hollywood.

The mistery of stable images

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:52:00 GMT

We know optically the eye is like a simple meniscus camera that projects an image onto the retina. We also know that on the cortex there is a holomorphic map of the visual field. However we know very little of what happens in between. For example, in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) there are seven layers, and if we stick a toothpick in a point like in a club sandwich, the layers are geometrically aligned.

But the human visual system (HVS) is not like a camcorder. Here is a simple test: take a camcorder and film what while you move down the street. Try doing this while walking, running, riding a camel, riding in a sports car. While you are doing this, each time you see the same scene.

Now remove the context, i.e., sit on a chair and watch what you filmed. The sports car piece will probably just be blurred, the other pieces will probably give you motion sickness and you will not make out much visual information. If you ever used a virtual reality system you know what I mean.

Add to this that you keep moving your head, and between fixation points your eyes keep saccading. We must conclude that the map on the cortex is not an image of the retina but an image of the real world. How does the HVS perform this feat?

Tim Gollisch of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology and Markus Meister of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University have solved this riddle and published their data on page 1108 of Science 22 February 2008.

The trick is performed by the retinal ganglion cells, which come in pairs of fast OFF cells and biphasic OFF cells, which receive inputs from both the ON and OFF pathways, and the slow OFF and ON cells. It turns out that they have different spike latencies, which can be e a powerful mechanism to rapidly transmit a new visual scene. Moreover, certain neurons in visual cortex are exquisitely sensitive to the coincidence of spikes on their afferents (30), which is one possible readout mechanism for a latency code.

The autors conclude that it is conceivable that early aspects of sensory processing operate on the basis of the classification of spike latency patterns.

A Color Calculator

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:18:00 GMT

A purely visual color calculator. No sliders, perceptual attribute correlates or instructions.

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Promoting happiness

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:42:00 GMT

Last December I wrote a short post about a Science paper providing neurophysiological evidence for the importance of social comparison on reward processing in the human brain. The last print version of Science has a paper teaching us how we can be even happier.

Elizabeth W. Dunn and Lara B. Aknin of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, and Michael I. Norton of the Harvard Business School in Boston write in their paper Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness that although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, they suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn.

Specifically, they hypothesize that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, they found that spending more of one's income on others predicted greater happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves.

They conclude that given that people appear to overlook the benefits of prosocial spending, policy interventions that promote prosocial spending — encouraging people to invest income in others rather than in themselves — may be worthwhile in the service of translating increased national wealth into increased national happiness.

The United States Declaration of Independence already postulates a right to pursue happiness, and the IRS encourages charitable donations by allowing a generous tax deduction for them, so our Government has already made the correct policy interventions. Now, when I look at my bank transactions for March, I am convinced I must be the happiest person in the world!

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CIC16 Submissions Due April 13

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:26:00 GMT

Conference Overview
We are delighted to invite you to the sixteenth Color Imaging Conference in Portland, Oregon. This will be the first time this conference has been held in the Pacific northwest and we anticipate another strong program of tutorials and papers in all areas of color imaging.

Join us from November 10th through the 15th in Portland as we hear the latest research in the areas of color theory, color in displays, novel printing technologies, and systems and workflows. This single track conference will also include the ever-popular interactive session where attendees directly engage the authors in their presentations and decide which interactive paper will be awarded the coveted Cactus Award for Best Interactive Paper.

This color imaging conference will also coincide with three other special events, as detailed in this flyer. First, ICC will again be hosting its DevCon symposium just prior to CIC. Second, there will a special program to honor the full gamut of colorful contributions by Dr. Robert W.G. Hunt to the color imaging community on Friday, November 14th. Finally, on the Saturday after the conference ISCC and IS&T will hold a special topics meeting provocatively titled “On Black and White.”

As always there will be high quality tutorials, informative and stimulating keynotes and plenty of opportunities to network with colleagues and peers, perhaps with a local micro-brew. Mark your calendars and please join us by the banks of the Willamette River for CIC16.

Author Reminder
For those of you out there considering submitting a paper to CIC 16, please keep in mind the author instructions here and the April 13th submission deadline.

We look forward to seeing you in Portland in November!

—James Larimer and Nathan Moroney,
General Chairs CIC16

Color Chart: Reinventing Color from 1950 to Today

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:16:00 GMT

Carinna Parraman wrote: "Check out the Internet version of the Color Chart exhibition at MOMA in NY, it is beautifully executed and certainly worth a visit."

Follow this link to MOMA to see what you can do with creativity, color, and Flash.

Blue citation from Carrie Mae Weems, Moody Blue Girl, 1988

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Administrative note and color lawsuits

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:57:00 GMT

First an administrative note. Most feedback we get from you, our esteemed readers, is in the form of personal email. Only rarely are we able to generate sufficient controversy to spark a debate in the blog comment section, such as with Non-local realism, An On-Line Color Thesaurus, or yesterday's Revolutionary White Reflectance Standard for Metrology. Therefore, we are happy for every good comment we get. However, as you are aware our blog server is rather crafty, and it is difficult for us to find comments when you replace the post title with your own title. This summer HP will be upgrading to commercial blogging software and this blog will run smoother, hopefully even multilingually. In the meantime here is my answer to a comment on color lawsuits I was unable to locate.

IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so I cannot tell you how many colors the Constitution on the Laws thinks you are seeing or entitled to seeing. From a color science point of view, color does not exist in nature, it is an illusion that is elicited in our visual system.

Colorimetry is the art to predict an illusion from a physical measurement, hence what we do in color reproduction is to try to build models that allow us to make statistical predictions of this illusion. Our supreme authority is the Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE), which in Definition 845-02-18 defines (perceived) color as follows:

Attribute of a visual perception consisting of any combination of chromatic and achromatic content. This attribute can be described by chromatic color names such as yellow, orange, brown, red, pink, green, blue, purple, etc., or by achromatic color names such as white, gray, black, etc., and qualified by bright, dim, light, dark etc., or by combinations of such names

Perceived color depends on the spectral distribution of the color stimulus, on the size, shape, structure and surround of the stimulus area, on the state of adaptation of the observer’s visual system, and on the observer’s experience of the prevailing and similar situations of observation

Perceived color may appear in several modes of appearance. The names for various modes of appearance are intended to distinguish among qualitative and geometric differences of color perceptions

As all the et cœteras in the definition reveal, there is nothing that allows you to count how many colors you can see. A metric you could use is to enumerate all the color names you can tell, i.e., the size of your color lexicon. However, the color lexicon is acquired, so its cardinality depends on your experience. The cardinality also depends on time, as we name more colors the more evolved the civilization gets.

For example, 2000 years ago, the Romans could not distinguish between blue and green. More recently, 1000 years ago, the Japanese, which had three colors — white/pure (shiroi), black/dark (kuroi), and colorful/red (akai) — added a fourth color to their vocabulary because tree leaves, sky, and the sea are colorful but not red, hence aoi became the name for those things, without distinction between green and blue. Even today midori (green) is not an attribute but a substantive; the color of an unripe apple is blue (aoi), not green (midori) because it does not make sense from a grammatical point of view.

We can use psychophysics to start with one color, then change is slightly until we perceive a just noticeable difference (JND), increment the counter by one, and start over with the next iteration step. This way we could determine that we can see something between 6,000 and 10,000 different colors. But when you look what populations name distinctly in a color thesaurus, you typically find a 700 to 900 word dictionary.

If we go back to the lawsuit discussed in that blog comment, we could take the position of the electrical engineer and look at the addressable number of colors. When a display can address 16,777,216 colors, this is many more than you can actually see, and even 262,144 is much larger than 10,000. From a color science point of view, the point is moot.

Turning the argument around, a printer can only put down or not put down cyan, magenta, yellow, or black marks. Yet you would not claim the printer is capable of printing only four colors. The trick is that the human visual system (HVS) has a limited resolution and therefore you can halftone colors with dithers.

In display monitors and TV the spatial resolution is much lower than in printers, so instead of spatial dithering, temporal dithering is used, but you still see the same color, it was just cooked differently. Remember, color is just an illusion elicited in the HVS.

One complaint in that post is that you can see artifacts when you can address less than 16,777,216 colors. That is moot too. Give me any two colors on an 8 bit display capable of displaying only 256 colors and I can produce a completely smooth gradient between your two colors, with each step below one JND.

This is the HVS as we know it in color science. IANAL, and I do not know if the law refers to a human visual system. For that matter, I do not even know if lawyers might live in a world where the photons are colored.

To close the loop, if you have comments, do not send me email, post them to the blog without changing the title.

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Revolutionary White Reflectance Standard for Metrology

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:50:00 GMT

Today two color scientists at HP Labs announced the introduction of a revolutionary new white reflectance standard for metrology. This new reflectance standard is a breakthrough in terms of cost, simplicity and unique environmentally friendly disposal process. This new white standard will have broad impact in the fields of photonics, digital photography and color measurement and is available for immediate commercial and research use.

Background
Numerous materials and processes have been proposed for use as white standards. These include smoked magnesium oxide and polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE. Both of these materials have significant drawbacks in environmental safety and complexity of preparation and disposal. The proposed white standard is shown in Figure 1 next to a freshly pressed PTFE or halon disk. Aside from the irregular border, the size, shape and general appearance of the proposed white standard greatly resemble that of the freshly pressed halon disk. The average cost of the white standard material is less than US$0.10 each in quantity. Bulk quantities of pre-packaged standards are also widely available through a number of distribution channels.

Figure 1. Pressed halon (left) compared to the proposed new white standard (right).

Optical Properties
The reflectance data for the proposed white standard at 25ºC are presented in Figure 2. This graph shows the reflectance of the standard relative to other commonly used white standards. This includes NPL calibrated Spectralon, freshly pressed PTFE, the white from the Macbeth chart, the white BCRA-NPL Series II tile (CCS II), and the white patch in the JOBO test chart. There is slight dip in the reflectance curve below 500 nanometers but as the results in Figure 3 show this is not a significant deviation for many applications. The goniophotometric properties, not shown here, are also quite good with a suprisingly nearly Lambertian bidirectional reflectance function. Finally, one of the hardest problems with calibrations targets is thermochromism, especially in ecological laboratories with a wide temperature excursion. To address this it has been proposed that polydiacetylene polymers may be formulated to provide compositions having numerous chromic transitions triggered by temperature changes. As explained in paragraph 9 of that invention, the reference white turns visibly blue when the temperature is below threshold.

Figure 2. Reflectance curves for a number of white relectance standards, including the newly proposed standard shown as a solid black line.

Camera White Balance
As one compelling example of this new white standard consider the challenege of white balance for digital phtography. An incorrect white point often results in a strong color cast as is shown in the top portion of Figure 3. The widespread availability of the proposed white reflectance standard can then be used with the manual white balance mode of the camera to capture a color corrected image, shown on the bottom of Figure 3. The white standard, shown between the pine cone and the slotted spoon, was used as the white region before the image was captured. The result is a dramatic improvement.

Figure 3. Before (above) and after (below) correction of a scene for an incorrect white balance using the proposed white standard.

Preparation
The proposed white reference material consists of a soft circular white material sandwiched between two black protective layers. The ideal preparation of the white standard is the removal of one of the hard layers, exposing the soft middle layer. In general a gentle, twisting motion is most effective. Care must be taken to avoid tearing or separating the white material from the protective base layer. Once one of the hard outer layers has been removed, any residual protective material should be removed using tweezers or a gentle brushing with a camel hair brush. Due the fragile nature of the material, compressed air should not be used to clean the standard. In practice the most dangerous substance is acetone, because it is widely used for cleaning purposes. Acetone will destroy the calibration target.

Figure 4. Removal of one of the two protective transport layers to reveal the white relectance layer using a quick, smooth twisting action.

Disposal
Once the standard has reached the end of its useful lifetime, it must be disposed of. This is one of the key strengths of this standard in that the disposal is achieved by ingestion. There may be variation in the exact number of standards that can be disposed of at once, but current experiments by the authors show that up to five white standards can easily be disposed of at once while other sources have shown that this number could be as high as seven. This is fairly close to the 51 gram manufacturer recommended serving size. The targets are suitable for use in compost piles or can be given to children.

Conclusions
Happy April Fool's Day! The data are real, as are the results shown in Figure 3 but this post is intended to be humorous. Yes that's an Oreo(tm) cookie in Figure 4 ;) Nathan and Giordano would like to thank Tim, Kevin and Seth for their contributions to this post. We have to admit we were quite pleased with the results for the camera cookie white balancing or CWB and plan more testing. When our fadeometer gets here we'll also have to see if we can sneak some cookies in.

Haliobacteria Red

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:01:00 GMT

Giordano has been quite busy with blue posts recently. This is a red post.

More specifically the red of haliobacteria.

A week ago one of my co-workers took three color scientists out for a flight around the bay in a Cessna. It was a perfect spring afternoon. Clear skies, calm winds and great views. The salt flats are an amazing sight. I took the picture below and made a mental note to learn more about these giant red ponds.

Back in front of a keyboard I learn from a Cargill page that the red salt ponds are a result of a haliobacteria, specifcially Dunaliella, that changes color as the water gets saltier. The saltier the water the redder the bacteria. I also learned that the bateria are actually eaten by brine shrimp, some of which are dried and sold as "sea monkeys". But I digress.

Checking another web page I see that these bacteria get their color by producing a red carotenoid pigment. Cartenoid pigments are also found in tomatoes, red peppers and flamingos. Although apparently the flamingos get this from the brine shrimp. But I should let Giordano post about the color of flamingos. The bottom of this web pages also notes recent research which suggests that these red bacteria with their anaerobic, or without oxygen, energy production might be among the oldest life forms on earth, pre-dating an atmosphere with significant levels of oxygen.

So perhaps red was the original color of an active environment, and not green? Finally the haliobacteria is quite radiation resistent and in an experiment was taken out into space and survived. Cool from the salt flats in the bay to outer space and back, all with haliobacteria red.

Blue rose

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:15:00 GMT

On next year's Valentine Day your roses might be blue. Suntory Ltd. has obtained government permission to market the world's first blue rose that it developed in 2004. The company plans to put it on sale in 2009 after building production facilities and sales outlets.

Roses have no genes to create a blue pigment, and rose growers have long worked hard in vain to produce a blue rose. In English, blue rose is a synonym for impossible. Suntory organized a Blue Rose Development Team jointly with its Australian subsidiary in 1990 and successfully produced a blue rose by recombining a gene capable of creating a blue pigment taken from pansy, using gene-splicing technology. In the process of the research, the team has succeeded in developing a blue carnation, which is already on sale in Japan.

A blue-like rose has already been produced by suppressing a red pigment through cross breeding and marketed in the world. But no rose with a blue pigment has ever been marketed yet.

Source: Kansai Window, Kippo News, Vol.14 No.562, Wednesday, February 20, 2008.

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Testing Express

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:31:00 GMT

Thanks to Pau for hurling a link to the new PhotoShop express online. Tried it out and found it to be an interesting combination of photo sharing and image editing with a flashy interface. It does have a button to 'turn photos into ahhhhtwork'. The back button is broken though.

The site notes that users that join get 2 gigabytes of storage for their images. There are then tools to explore the images, create online albums and edit the images. In the image editing modality the page offers 17 image editing options. The tools have hip little text pop-ups and when an option is selected the interface to the editing a purely viusal interafce consisting of a row of image thumbnails with varying degrees of pre-set options corresponding to the tool. The example shown above is for the 'Hue' tool and the original image has had various hue rotations applied to it. The purely visual user interface to the tools is smooth and pretty intuitive.

The 'back' button is broken though. 'Back' might someday map to 'undo' but at this point one can only speculate on the future for the back button. At least for flashy online tools.

Performance update

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:13:00 GMT

A year ago I posted two entries on hyperthreads and multicores that were relatively popular. A short post on the the Performance Agora has an interesting comparison of the performance of the latest crop of Intel chips suggesting that the 8-way Penryn TPC-C performance now matches a 16-way Xeon of 2 years ago.

Performance experts like Neil Gunther worry mostly about database transactions and servicing HTTPS requests. For us color scientists working on color reproduction systems, the performance picture is different. Historically, we have always been fighting with the problem that we are ten years behind marking engine designers in terms of ripping pages as fast as the printers can consume them.

For us the hour of truth will come at the end of this year, when Intel will start shipping Nehalem. We will have to revisit our software architectures to take advantage of the new QuickPath platform architecture with fast integrated memory controllers. With QuickPath each processor has its own dedicated memory, so we will have to redesign how we map rendering in memory.

Faster bus and better stall prevention, will probably allow us to use more GPUs per system, which will likely require we rearchitect our whole rendering pipelines.

For more details on Nehalem, see Intel's whitepaper. For more details on QuickPath, see this other withepaper.

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2008 IS&T fellows

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:40:00 GMT

On behalf of the 2008 IS&T Honors and Awards Committee, the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) today has announced those individuals selected for 2008 IS&T Fellowship. Fellowship is awarded to a Regular Member for outstanding achievement in imaging science or engineering. Ordinarily this will be demonstrated by citing several journal publications or patents for which the candidate is the sole or major contributor. Regular membership in the Society for at least three years prior to the time of nomination is required. At the time of award, the recipient must be a Regular Member in good standing. Not more than five awards per year are bestowed.

The new IS&T Fellows are:

Roger David Hersch (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) “for his contributions to halftoning, multispectral imaging, and digital typography”
Nathan M. Moroney (Hewlett-Packard Company) “for his contributions to scientific experimentation, practical application, and standardization of innovative color imaging technologies”
Richard Veregin (Xerox Research Centre of Canada) “for his contributions to electrophotographic toner and developer design”
David S. Weiss (Eastman Kodak Company) “for his contributions to the science and technology of electrophotographic imaging materials”

I am proud I can count the first half as longtime friends.

Roger was a year ahead of me studying mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. We got to know each other by being both active in the Filmstelle, a student organization that twice a week borrowed cinematographic masterpieces from the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne and exhibited them in a large auditorium.

Nathan (here with his wife Elizabeth Pirrotta) goes back to when I was taking courses in color science from Robert Hunt and Mark Fairchild at the RIT Munsell Color Science Laboratory and he was a student there. We both ended up at HP Labs and as you know we are partners in crime by conspiring to write this blog for you.

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Research policy update

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:46:00 GMT

From time to time I have been posting about the research process itself, i.e., research policy. Today I will just post two links to two other blogs with recent posts on this subject.

Jon Stokes writes on ars technica on paying for secrets: national security versus tech innovation, while Neil Gunther writes on Performance Agora on USA High Tech R&D Trending Down.

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