3 ms·
When you store it on disk, an image is zeros and ones, the same as audio. The informational complexity is definable in terms of how much it can be compressed, a
by syntheweave 4y ago
When you store it on disk, an image is zeros and ones, the same as audio. The informational complexity is definable in terms of how much it can be compressed, and if lossy, an acceptable range of information loss.
- bergenty 4y agoYes but in terms of degrees of freedom, an image is way more complex. You can literally quantify every aspect of how audio is represented, something you can’t do with an image.
- syntheweave 4y ago"Every aspect" would mean unlimited numbers of sound sources from all distances and directions, which is not how we represent sound, which is usually limited to two stereo channels at 44.1kHz and 16 bits in CD-quality audio, but with higher resolutions for surround or to reduce signal processing artifacts. An image is likewise limited by representation in that we define against a resolution, color depth, gamma, etc. Images define a large number of sample sources, but without variation over time. And in most circumstances, like with audio, we also currently limit the sources to fixed areas, rather than generating surround images. What we're relying on in using these formats successfully is knowing the limits of our sensory perception, and then what our brain does to process it. It says nothing about "A is easier to represent symbolically than B", because of course you can come up with symbolic compression schemes; those are how humans generate interesting images and audio. But the transmission protocol doesn't need to know them.