Articles by Mike Perkins

In the first post of this three-part series, I listed four points that I hope my readers will agree with at the end of this series. The second post addressed the first two points of the four. In this post, Part Three of the series, I will demonstrate the final two points: Phase distortions generally… View Article

In this post I will demonstrate that dramatically different time domain waveforms can lead to virtually the same audio perception, and two waveforms with identical spectrograms can sound quite different.

You may have encountered spectral analysis. The basic idea is to take a waveform, in our case an audio clip, and determine which frequency components are in it. This post provides a very brief overview of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), spectrograms and DFT spectral analysis.

At Cardinal Peak, we are willing to include royalties as part of our compensation under certain circumstances, but there are powerful constraints limiting our appetite for such deals. So in this post, I’ll explain a few of our reservations about royalties.

When a prospective customer calls us, they generally have one of two engagement models in mind: time and materials (T&M), or fixed price. This post explains why Cardinal Peak strongly prefers T&M engagements to FP ones — and why savvy customers should, too.

If you’ve ever had occasion to watch video on a computer, you might have noticed that it doesn’t look like it does on your TV. This is especially true when watching interlaced video. This post briefly describes some issues associated with using a computer as a video display device. Let’s start with interlaced video. What… View Article

The use of transforms in data compression algorithms is at least 40 years old. The goal of this three-part series of posts is to provide the mathematical background necessary for understanding transforms and to explain why they are a valuable part of many compression algorithms. I’m focusing on video since that’s my particular interest. Part… View Article

The use of transforms in data compression algorithms is at least 40 years old. The goal of this three-part series of posts is to provide the mathematical background necessary for understanding transforms and to explain why they are a valuable part of many compression algorithms. I’m focusing on video since that’s my particular interest. Part… View Article

The use of transforms in data compression algorithms is at least 40 years old. The goal of this three-part series of posts is to provide the mathematical background necessary for understanding transforms and to explain why they are a valuable part of many compression algorithms. I’ll focus on video since that’s my particular interest. Part… View Article

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago that resonated strongly with me. Although the article deals with the problem of project planning for infrastructure projects, it’s really about irrational optimism. Why is it that infrastructure projects always cost more and take longer than expected? (As anyone reading this… View Article

I just saw this news about research that says you notice compression artifacts less if you like the content of a particular video clip: Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to… View Article

One of our clients is heavily involved in 3D video and has been for several years. However, several are just now starting to think about it because of the uptick of interest in the consumer electronics world. Enough questions have been posed to us recently that it seemed worthwhile to me to pull together a… View Article