Blog Post
EE Times: How to Build Video Devices for the IoT
I’ve got a new blog post up at EE Times, talking about how to build video devices for the Internet of Things: Video cameras are uniquely compelling sensors because vision is our dominant sense. Video is invaluable for applications such as license plate recognition, robot navigation, and quality monitoring. Unfortunately, video is also one of…
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What Does the Aereo Decision Mean for Innovation?
I was interviewed by Xconomy today in a piece entitled “Could Fallout from Aereo Ruling Have “Chilling Effect On Startups?” Here’s a little more analysis than what was covered in the Xconomy article. The question of how the decision would affect innovation was raised immediately after the ruling by Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s CEO, when he…
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Choosing the Correct Video Sampling Format
We’re a little late in posting this, but I wrote a blog entry for EDN last week that discusses how to choose the correct video sampling format. An excerpt: To process signals digitally, they must first be sampled and quantized. Sampling refers to measuring the light intensity at discrete space-time points, while quantization is the…
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Thoughts on Streaming Video Securely
The kind folks at EDN have asked Cardinal Peak to author an occasional blog about streaming video. The first post went live this morning and discusses streaming video securely: Until recently, the accepted wisdom in the industry was that end users didn’t care about encrypting this type of video, as long as it was a…
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The Continuing Devaluation of “k”
The digital video industry seems destined to make resolution confusing. I just got back from NAB last week, where “4k video” was everywhere, and I want to tell you a story about video resolutions. (This is all using the resolutions that are common in the NTSC world, which basically means in the U.S. and Canada….
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How Low Can You Go?
Last night I went to the Denver IEEE meeting of the Signal Processing Society. I was particularly interested in this talk because it was given by Gary Sullivan, the co-chair of the recent international standardization effort to create the High Efficiency Video Coding Standard (HEVC).
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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.
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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…
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