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.
Keep That Product Simple!
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
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
Spectral Analysis with the DFT
Signal Processing
By Mike Perkins
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
The Future of Clutter
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
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 ArticleDetails
We’ve Moved
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
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 ArticleDetails
Using Lossy Video Compression in the Courtroom
Video
By Howdy Pierce
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
Using Windows Movie Maker With the Kodak Zi8
Video
By Ben Mesander
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 ArticleDetails
ElcomSoft’s Hack of Image Authentication
Software Development
By Howdy Pierce
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 ArticleDetails