BLOG

Our blog focuses on sharing our experience and knowledge across a wide range of technologies and industries including hardware and software design, audio, video, internet of things, mobile application and signal processing technologies.

Howdy Pierce Keep That Product Simple! When it comes to bringing a brand new product to market, keep it simple. The important thing is to get to market quickly, with low development costs, and get feedback from your customers about how to make the product better. Details
Mike Perkins How Robust Is Audio Perception in the Face of Deliberate Magnitude and Phase Distortions? (Part 3) 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 Details
Mike Perkins How Robust Is Audio Perception in the Face of Deliberate Magnitude and Phase Distortions? (Part 2) 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. Details
Mike Perkins Spectral Analysis with the DFT 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. Details
Howdy Pierce How to Measure the Bitrate of a Video Stream Occasionally we need to measure the bitrate of a particular video stream on the network. In this example I will show how to measure the data rate of a video streamed from Amazon.com. Details
Howdy Pierce The Future of Clutter If you’re looking to predict what technologies will be obsolete soon, visiting the Kodak booth at CES is not a bad place to start. I came to this realization as I was watching a demo from one of Kodak’s partners, Unibind. Unibind is demonstrating a new machine at CES that allows retailers to create a… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce We’ve Moved I’m a little late in posting this here, but it’s been a busy couple of months. As has already been reported in the local press, Cardinal Peak moved in late September. We’ve been adding some folks in the past year, and we had outgrown our previous location. But we also had a couple of other… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce Using Lossy Video Compression in the Courtroom I’m at the DSI conference in Las Vegas today, presenting a primer for law enforcement investigators on how video compression works and trying to answer the question of why “lossy” compression should be considered reliable for use in courtrooms. The lack of trust in digital media compression in a forensic setting is primarily a PR issue for the media compression industry — if such an industry can be said to exist. We use terms like “lossy compression” and “predicted blocks” — terms that have relatively precise technical meaning. But these terms also have a slightly different meaning to laymen, and that everyday meaning isn’t exactly reassuring if you’re a judge relying on testimony compressed using a lossy compression algorithm. Details
Mike Perkins Using Royalties to Pay for Engineering Services 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. Details
Using Windows Movie Maker With the Kodak Zi8 In a previous blog post, I mentioned I had a Kodak Zi8 video camera. This past weekend, I decided I wanted to try Windows Movie Maker (WMM) to edit videos produced with it, instead of the built-in Arcsoft MediaImpression software that the camera installs on the PC it is connected to. (Although I haven’t tested… View Article Details
Mike Perkins Why We Engage on a Time-and-Materials Basis 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. Details
Howdy Pierce ElcomSoft’s Hack of Image Authentication There was some interesting news yesterday about the cracking of an image authentication mechanism built into Nikon cameras. The hack was announced in what seemed to me like a rather adolescent post on the ElcomSoft company blog: ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. researched Nikon’s Image Authentication System, a secure suite validating if an image has been altered… View Article Details
25 pages of results