For years, camera manufacturers have been building cameras with more and more pixels. It seems/seemed as if there is no limit to the number of megapixels you can get in your camera.
In theory, this is true: the more pixels you have in your camera, the more details you can capture, and the larger the prints you can make. However, we also all want small, compact cameras. So the camera manufacturers do their best to fit this larger number of pixels into the same or an even smaller camera housing, with the same sensor and lens size. And that’s where it gets tricky, because if you increase the number of pixels and keep the sensor size the same, the size of each pixel has to decrease. And a smaller pixel can capture less light, which results in relatively more noise. So the resulting images are noisier. Also, it does not make much sense to have a sensor that can capture more details if your lens does not let those details pass through. The lens should therefore also be replaced by one with a higher quality, and better lenses are typically also bigger.
So, there is an optimum. And the people at Image Engineering have measured that the optimum for a compact camera is 6 megapixels. They have even devoted a website to it. Of course, this does not hold if you also increase the sensor size (for example in SLR cameras). It is therefore better to say that the optimal pixel size is 3 micrometer. Depending on the sensor size, one can then compute the optimal number of pixels.
OK, you’ve made a reproducible research (RR) paper. How to make it available online?
At LCAV, we started off by simply making an HTML web page with all the paper details and additional information (data, code, additional figures), and putting that on our lab website.
While this is a very straightforward way of working, it is probably not very practical in the long term, as a new web page has to be made for each new publication. I can also imagine writing HTML may seem a big step (or just too cumbersome) to some. That’s why we have developed, in collaboration with the EPrints team, a Reproducible Research Repository setup. It has to be configured once (by your system administrator?), and allows you then to upload new RR papers by filling out a form with all the necessary information and uploading PDF, code, data, and/or any other additional material. I think it is really a lot more user-friendly than creating HTML pages each time. At the same time, it assures that all the information is there, and creates nice web pages (see here for an example of the repository front page, and here for an example of a page for a paper).
Continue reading ‘Putting reproducible research papers online’
We (Jelena Kovacevic, Martin Vetterli, and me) recently submitted a paper on reproducible research to IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: “What, Why and How of Reproducible Research in Signal Processing“. It describes our experiences with reproducible research at LCAV (EPFL) and CMU, as well as a study on reproducibility of articles that appeared in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (to which many people contributed). Feel free to take a look!
It also describes a setup for putting reproducible research publications online, about which I hope to post more info soon. One thing I already want to mention is that it is freely available for download!
We also did some advertizing for this paper recently by e-mail, and I must admit it is always nice to see the reactions you get… ! It was also picked up in the blogosphere by John Cook, hosting www.reproducibleresearch.org, here and here, and by Greg Wilson on The Third Bit.
But more about reproducible research soon…
The digital camera manufacturer Leica built a pixelated dog to promote their new camera (Leica D-Lux 3), using small blocks, glue, and a lot of time. Or, as they put it, to show what the world would look like with less pixels.
Strange effect, such a pixelated object in a real world!
(done by marketing firm Philipp und Keuntje, and seen at DS Marketingblog and Gizmodo)
Welcome on my personal blog!
On these pages, I plan to post thoughts and ideas on reproducible research, image processing research, or other things I find interesting enough to share with “the world” (that means you). It is also meant for experimenting with this medium, so it is still a bit unclear to me what and how often I will post here. I guess that will also depend on your feedback…
To be honest, it’s not my first attempt at blogging. When I was still at EPFL, I already started a blog on reproducible research, but somehow I never managed to publish things regularly enough there. So this time I’ll try to keep it a bit broader, and write a bit more regularly.
