[mythtv-users] OT: 4K TV. But why (yet)?

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Fri Dec 4 18:54:10 UTC 2015


On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 8:13 AM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/2015 02:23 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
> Who said anything about upscaling an image to a higher resolution or about
> edge detection or enhancements?  I was talking about image processing.

Upscaling and edge detection are examples of image processing.

> I
> simply said that a 1920x1080 display cannot represent all the information
> contained in a 1920x1080 image.

It can, unless you're using some non-standard definition of "information".

> Displaying them in a 1:1 mapping "reconstructs" the image, not
> the scene.  In short, the real world isn't digital.

And television isn't the real world.  All sorts of postprocessing
effects have already been applied to most of these images.
Assumptions about camera characteristics are just that, assumptions,
and may not apply to the image.

> Image processing can be used to reconstruct the
> original scene described by that physically-limited camera's samples.

Right, by guessing and inserting new information not present in the image.

You also need to keep in mind that there's a tremendous amount of
wetware image processing going on as well.  Any software image
processing is just going to be feeding input into the wetware image
enhancers, and that last step cannot be disabled.

> Funny, but you have that backwards.  An artist's rendering at 1920x1080 can
> be displayed at 1920x1080 and there's no more information to be found

That wasn't what I meant.  What I meant was that I can take any low
resolution image, even a rediculously low resolution image (e.g.
32x32), and ask an artist to produce an arbitrarily high resolution
image of what he thinks the original represents.  Humans are very good
at detecting form and patterns in low resolution images, even in cases
where no pattern exists.  The extra information in the high resolution
version of the image produced by the artist doesn't come from the
source image, it comes from the artist.  The artist is doing exactly
what your "image processing" is doing.

Eric


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