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Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2017
Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent is a massive and fast-growing event. Estimates for this year’s attendance range between 40,000 and 50,000 people, and it was sold out nearly two weeks before the first day. This year there are over 1000 breakout sessions covering a dozen or more tracks, as well as workshops, certification classes, hands-on labs,… View Article
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Google I/O Rundown
Here’s a quick rundown from a tech perspective of what Google announced last week at its I/O conference: Google.ai Google bases most of its service model on artificial intelligence (AI). In this year’s I/O, they announced some really cool new data-center clusters called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs): huge, heavy-duty number-crunching machines that each provide up… View Article
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Expanding the Wild Blue Yonder
Last month, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced yet another new Bluetooth® spec, called Bluetooth 5. This new release, out at the end of this year or early next, quadruples the range and doubles the speed of the previous spec. When they hit the market, Bluetooth 5-enabled devices will be able to connect at speeds… View Article
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Keeping It All in Sync: Part Two
Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of synching audio and video, something that we use in many applications. We’ve already discussed why it’s necessary, and today I want to talk about the different ways to do it, some easier than others. Adjust the Video The most common and easiest way to correct for… View Article
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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
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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.
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Transforms for Video Compression, Part 1: Vectors, the Dot Product and Orthonormal Bases
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
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Rolling CMOS Shutters and Curved Wiper Blades
One time last winter I shot a photo with my camera phone out the windshield of my car and got a strange image with curved wiper blades: No, my wipers don’t look like this! I’ve been meaning to track down the reason why this happened. It is clear that cellphone cameras don’t usually use mechanical… View Article
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Creating Single-Frame Movies
My camera (an Olympus SP-570UZ) allows me to optionally record a four-second audio clip with each photo I take. I haven’t used this feature much because I typically upload my photos to Flickr, and there’s been no good way to associate the audio with the video. Ideally, I would like an audio player to appear… View Article
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Creating the Orton Effect in Gimp
Recently I decided to learn how to write scripts in the Gimp image-editing program to automate certain tasks. The first task I wanted to automate was the Orton effect. This is an effect invented by Michael Orton in the 1990s, which consists of taking two copies of an image, one blurred, and one sharp, and… View Article
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Thoughts on 3D After NAB
I just returned from this year’s NAB show, where I was bombarded with 3D demos in virtually every booth. Most of the factors driving this 3D superabundance originate outside of the broadcast industry itself. First, TV manufacturers are hot on 3D as a way to get everyone who just bought an HDTV to upgrade to… View Article
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Delta Sigma Converters: Filtering, Decimation and Simulations
In my first post on ΔΣ converters I presented an intuitive way to derive the modulator portion of the converter. Now we need to look at what comes after the modulator — namely, the digital filter and the decimator. The high-level structure of the converter looks like this: The analog input voltage, v(t), is assumed… View Article
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