25 ms·

I'm curious about what are the consequences of the discovery. What effects will this have on the storage of photos? Can this principal be extrapolated to othe

I'm curious about what are the consequences of the discovery. What effects will this have on the storage of photos? Can this principal be extrapolated to other forms of data?

iskander 17y ago
Despite the article's somewhat confusing presentation, compressed sensing isn't primarily about photos. It's a principle that can be used to reconstruct any sort of signal from a small number of measurements. The only requirement is that we can find a representation for that signal that is sparse (every signal maps to some vector of mostly 0s). Luckily, most natural signals have this property (whereas random noise is not sparse in any representation). The fundamental breakthrough here is that we can acquire signals (photos, recordings, MRI volumetric images, etc...) using a much smaller number of samples than previously thought possible. A useful application: let radiologists accurately image the body in less time. A weird application: Single-pixel cameras (http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel-camera.html http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel-c...)
- hammmatt 17y ago
  Thank you for the more in-depth explanation. The signal pixel camera is an interesting application. I would imagine one of the most powerful applications would be compression of files. Might make things easy for big websites like facebook. Or allow zip to make files smaller. Or a flash card that hold more information. I'd had to learn more about the technology. But EE standpoint there are two big questions: How fast is the process? I'd imagine that it work fast enough for images, voice and but not fast enough for video. I'd imagine the speed will increase as people start playing with it. And does the photo have to be compressed using the algorithm? The single pixel camera idea and many other signal capture operations really open up if you can just take a swab of the signal at random intervals. Perhaps a cool little program could be written to hunt for the necessary data points and capture them. This technology will definitely bring improvement to many fields over time.

I'm curious about what are the consequences of the discovery. What effects will this have on the storage of photos? Can this principal be extrapolated to other forms of data?

iskander 17y ago

Despite the article's somewhat confusing presentation, compressed sensing isn't primarily about photos. It's a principle that can be used to reconstruct any sort of signal from a small number of measurements. The only requirement is that we can find a representation for that signal that is sparse (every signal maps to some vector of mostly 0s). Luckily, most natural signals have this property (whereas random noise is not sparse in any representation). The fundamental breakthrough here is that we can acquire signals (photos, recordings, MRI volumetric images, etc...) using a much smaller number of samples than previously thought possible. A useful application: let radiologists accurately image the body in less time. A weird application: Single-pixel cameras (http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel-camera.html http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel-c...)

hammmatt 17y ago
Thank you for the more in-depth explanation. The signal pixel camera is an interesting application. I would imagine one of the most powerful applications would be compression of files. Might make things easy for big websites like facebook. Or allow zip to make files smaller. Or a flash card that hold more information. I'd had to learn more about the technology. But EE standpoint there are two big questions: How fast is the process? I'd imagine that it work fast enough for images, voice and but not fast enough for video. I'd imagine the speed will increase as people start playing with it. And does the photo have to be compressed using the algorithm? The single pixel camera idea and many other signal capture operations really open up if you can just take a swab of the signal at random intervals. Perhaps a cool little program could be written to hunt for the necessary data points and capture them. This technology will definitely bring improvement to many fields over time.