I discovered today that the history of Digital Image Processing started with developments made in JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in the 1960’s and a few other research facilities. More can be found on this topic at the Wikipedia link below.

Of course there is one founder member of JPL that I am very familiar with and that is Jack (Whiteside) Parsons. Who also happens to be the subject of the TV drama series ‘Strange Angel’.

Only in the irrational and unknown direction can we come to wisdom again.

-Jack Whiteside Parsons-

Digital image processing (Accessed 09.11.2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_image_processing

Today in class I was asked, what was the first computer I used and I had to think waaaaay back. It also took a while.

Was it the Aston 3 I though! A primitive beast that looked like it had been made in somebody’s shed and generated TV captions. It stored everything on a fearsome looking 7″ floppy disc that could be erased by a change of wind direction.

Or was it the Abekas A72, another Caption Generator with a sleek futuristic keyboard and half a rack of hardware to support its amazing ant-aliasing powers.

Or could it have been the CMX Edit control system, driven by Unix command prompt with GPI’s for external FX units such as Vision Mixers and DVE’s.

Or maybe it the Quantel Paintbox, which was the forerunner to Adobe Photoshop but was definitely not as portable.

No it was in fact the Amiga 500.

This was a popular gaming machine in its day but we used it for generating info trivia boxes for the 1980’s Channel 4/ITV music Show ‘The Chart Show’. An illegible example of this can be seen at around 2 minutes on this clip from the show.

The lecturer mentioned in class this week that Women were able to see a wider variety of colour than men.

This reminded me of a workshop I attended organised by Screen Skills Ireland a few years back which spoke about the difference between the colour space of Standard Definition and High Definition TV.

The facilitator started his initial lecture by talking about the anatomy of the human eye and how we perceive colour through a collection of cones and rods within the retina.  As it turns out Women generally have more cones which means expanded sensitivity within the red area of the colour spectrum.

This week we were introduced to the program which we are going to be using throughout the module OpenCV. While using this program we were advised to be aware that when operating within the more familiar RGB colour space this program preferred to mix things up a little for reasons best known to itself and operate within a BGR colour space. Which offers no significant problem until you decide to output into a program which uses RGB and then some kind of conversion process is required.

This reminded me of my youth as an intern working briefly at the BBC. I noticed one day that they were also very fond of this particular arrangement of these three components, which I would usually notice after I had hurriedly wired video monitoring equipment incorrectly, much to the annoyance of the chief engineer.

I asked him one day why they preferred using a BGR labelling scheme when everybody else seemed to prefer using RGB. He looked at me quizzically, slowly put down his cup of tea, took a long drag from his cigarette and replied “Because we’re the f**king BBC, that’s why’.

I come from a Broadcast TV/Video background, and I am looking forward to exploring a field which I would have some familiarity with from a new perspective.

When I began my TV career, the idea of digital imagery would be regarded as something quite exotic and unusual, at that time we would be more familiar with it’s fuzzier counterpart the analogue image, which originated from celluloid or was scanned with an electron beam, that would then be encoded and fired down the wire with the aid of vector based technology to wherever it needed to go.