Archiving Conference at the National Archives building Washington DC

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Imaging society organizes Archiving Conference to be held at the National Archives building on Constitution Ave.

Dates: 2 – 5 April 2013

Background: This is the 10th Annual Archiving Conference, organized by the Soc. for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). Previous meetings have also been held in San Antonio, Ottawa, The Hague, and last year in Copenhagen. The conference brings together imaging scientists and engineers, and those working in the cultural heritage community (curators, archivists, librarians, etc.). The focus is on the topics related to the digital preservation and stewardship of hardcopy, audio, and video. Anticipated attendance is about 200.

What is interesting this year? Two keynote talks and a CURATEcamp Unconference

1. Identification of previously unidentified remains of American Korean War casualties.

Doug Munson, (Chicago Albumen Works) will describe the restoration of historical photographic material. The project is for the US military, based in Hawaii, and has been used in the identification of previously unidentified remains of American Korean War casualties through recovery of acetate x-rays. Carl Stephan (Forensic Anthropologist from Univ. of Queensland, Australia), who has worked with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), will also speak.

2.  The Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records

Paul Wester, the Chief Records Officer for the US Government, will discuss efforts to reform records management practices throughout the US Federal Government.

3. CURATEcamp Unconference: Digitized / Born Digital Together

A CURATECAMP brings individuals together to discuss topics they define. For this special condensed version, the theme is Digitized / Born Digital Together. The theme was selected to take advantage of Archiving 2013’s rich combination of experts — those working in imaging and digital curation within the cultural, academic, and industry sectors.

The ‘unconference’ format of CURATECAMP encourages attendees to identify and discuss the issues they care about the most, leading to progress on solving real problems. Two key ideas are that participants define the agenda and that there are no spectators. Everyone who comes should plan on actively participating in and helping to lead discussions. For more information on CURATECAMP, how it works, and past topics visit http://curatecamp.org/

Conference website: http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/archiving/index.cfm

Program: https://www.box.com/s/47gvoayfhzxe06w32nl8

JPEGmini – your photos on a diet?

Recently I was made aware of JPEGmini, http://www.jpegmini.com/, a product that is described as optimized JPEG compression for your photos. Compression up to 5x was touted, which is not very impressive to people developing image compression. However, the claims of virtually no loss of image quality got me interested, so I devised an experiment to verify the claims, and evaluate JPEGmini’s performance.

Background: JPEGmini’s claims are based on the compression of JPEG files. These are already compressed by the processing of digital cameras by about 3x. This is due to the natural statistics of image data, and  is routinely done with little or no apparent loss or distortion. JPEGmini compression of up to 5x, therefore implies an overall compression of about 15x. Sounds impressive, but is it? After downloading several demo. image sets (before and after JPEGmini processing), I observed little or no loss of detail or introduction of distortion, quantization, etc. So far, good news …

But how good Is it? To access the value of JPEGmini’s optimized JPEG compression, I used ordinary JPEG to compress several of their example image files. When saving a JPEG file, most software allows the selection of a quality level, usually on a [0 -100] scale. By adjusting the quality level for each image, I was able to generate files with the same size as the corresponding JPEGmini files. To compress the original camera images I used PhotoFiltre, http://www.photofiltre-studio.com/, a great free photo-edting programme by Antonio Da Cruz. The quality level settings that were needed to match the file sizes ranged from 72 – 85.

Comparison: After close visual inspection the results from JPEGmini were virtually identical to those from PhotoFiltre’s standard JPEG. So while the results were good, at least for the images tested, they were not unique – optimized or not.

BlackburnPhoto_compare

Dog’s eye, cropped from full image.

Refined Measurement of Digital Image Texture Loss / Noise-power spectrum

Posted presentation from the recent Electronic Imaging Symposium. This may be of interest to those developing imaging performance methods via (noise- or signal-) spectra. I describe a simple step that improves the power-spectrum measurement, by making it more robust in the presence lens shading, etc.

http://www.slideshare.net/Pdburns/refined-measurement-of-digital-image-texture-loss-16516950