Satellites Are Really Old

Here’s something to ponder: Why is Galileo called Galileo? Other great astronomers and scientists are known by their last names: Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, etc. Tycho Brahe is known by his first name, but he was Danish, and that was their style at the time. Galileo’s compatriots were known by their last names, but he wasn’t. Why? And what (if anything) does it have to do with the technology of our industry?

This week, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will be presenting its 63rd-annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. Eight technologies will be honored. One is frequently called the Bloom Mobile (left), or, in the Academy’s language, “Development of Integrated, Deployable Systems for Live Reporting from Remote Environments.” Statues for it will be awarded to journalist David Bloom (posthumously), NBC, and MTN Satellite communications.

That was by no means the first time the Academy found satellite-related technology to be Emmy-worthy. In 2011, HBO and Elmer Musser got awards for satellite-transmitter identification; in 2010, the Metropolitan Opera won for the technology (including satellite delivery) of its global cinemacasts. PanAmSat and DirecTV were honored with 2006 awards, AT&T for the first intercontinental satellite transmission with a 2005 award, DirecTV and EchoStar for their spot-beam work with 2004 awards, etc., all the way back to 1966 awards to Hughes Aircraft and Comsat for the Early Bird satellite (right).

Early Bird (or Intelsat-1) wasn’t the first satellite. It wasn’t even the first artificial satellite (that was Sputnik, a model of which is shown at left,) or even the first commercial communications satellite to carry television signals (Telstar, right). Sputnik was launched in 1957 and Telstar in 1962. Early Bird wasn’t launched until 1965, by which time “live via satellite” was already a well-known phrase on TV.

Telstar was the reason for the 2005 AT&T award (the Academy sometimes takes a long time to get around to its awards; the statues for the 1940-41 work of the first National Television System Committee, or NTSC — not even the second one, which standardized NTSC color — were presented in 2010). If Telstar laid the groundwork, however, why (other than its name) did Early Bird get the earlier award?

It’s because of the orbit that Early Bird was placed in, a geostationary orbit. If a satellite is put into an orbit of 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above mean sea level (a geosynchronous orbit), then it will take it about 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete a trip around the planet, the same amount of time it takes the earth to spin on its axis. If the orbit is over the equator and heading east, therefore, the object in orbit will appear to be at a fixed position in the sky (a geostationary orbit).

What’s so special about a geostationary orbit? Consider Arthur (left). Arthur was the first antenna at the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall, England. It was named for the Camelot king, whose legendary castle was not far away (other dishes there include Merlin, Guinevere, and Lancelot). Arthur was built in 1962, for use with Telstar. Arthur is 25.9 meters (85 feet) in diameter and weighs 1.118 gigagrams (more than 1,232 tons). Telstar, unfortunately, did not have a geostationary orbit, so Arthur, all 1,232+ tons of him, had to move to track the satellite across the sky. Not only was moving such a big dish an extraordinary task, but, even with the movement, the satellite connection was possible only during that portion of the orbit when the satellite could be “seen” by both the transmitting and receiving antennas (about 20 minutes for a transatlantic hop).

Merlin, at 32 meters (105 feet) in diameter, is even bigger, but, by the time it was put into service, geostationary satellites had eliminated the need for tracking and made full-time satellite communications possible. Not only home satellite TV but also modern cable TV might not have been possible without that orbit. In fact, when the Academy honored Hubert Schlafly (right) for multichannel cable-TV technology in 1992, part of the reason was Schlafly’s nationwide geostationary-satellite reception testing in the early 1970s (the second statue shown was for his work on the through-the-lens prompter).

Early Bird was the first commercial geostationary communications satellite, but Syncom-3 beat it by a year and actually carried television coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games live from Tokyo to North America (Syncom-1 was lost, and Syncom-2′s orbit wasn’t equatorial, so antenna tracking was required). And where did the idea of having an earth-synchronized communications satellite come from? John Pierce, a satellite engineer working at Bell Labs, lectured on the subject in 1954 (published in 1955), but the Academy chose to honor in 1982 even earlier work by a different satellite-related Arthur, Arthur C. Clarke.

Probably best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke was a radar specialist during World War II and, even before the war was over, wrote a letter, on behalf of the British Interplanetary Society, to Wireless World magazine (published in February 1945). It was called “Peacetime Uses for V2,” a reference to the German attack rockets, and it contained the following sentences. “An ‘artificial satellite’ at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth’s surface. Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet.”

In the October 1945 issue of the same periodical, he published a highly detailed, illustrated, four-page paper called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” A portion of Figure 3 from the paper is shown above. Thanks to that paper, the geostationary orbit is sometimes referred to as “the Clarke orbit.” But he wasn’t the first, either.

Clarke’s paper cites, as its third reference, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (The Problem of Space Travel), by Hermann Noordung. Noordung was the pseudonym for Herman Potočnik, a rocket scientist who died in 1929. The referenced book, though Clarke’s paper didn’t cite the date, was published in 1928, and it describes not only the geostationary orbit but also communications between something parked there and the ground. The “something” was likely to be a large, spinning, circular space station of the sort seen in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. A portion of an illustration from the book is shown below. Note the dish at “top” (nominally actually the earth-facing bottom).

Although Potočnik might have been the first to describe communication between an object in geostationary orbit and the earth, he was by no means the first to describe the orbit itself. In 1895, for example, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist, proposed a means of moving things to a “castle” in a geostationary orbit via something now called a space elevator. The idea came to him when he saw the slightly older Eiffel Tower. Although no space elevator has yet been achieved, neither has the concept been rejected. At right is an illustration of NASA’s conception of the idea (click on it for a larger view).

If the geostationary orbit has been known since the 19th century, just how old is it? Well, that space has existed as long as the earth has — about 4.5 billion years, by the latest reckoning (and, although there’s not as much data about it, it appears that our oldest satellite, the moon, is almost as old). So, perhaps the question should be rephrased. How long ago might someone have come up with the distance of a geostationary orbit?

The idea that orbital duration is tied to orbital distance may be found in Johannes Kepler’s third law of planetary motion. And where did that idea come from? The answer involves a false nose, a suppressed need to urinate, a trial for witchcraft, and the reason Galileo is called Galileo.

It begins at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. He’s shown at left as the Roman god of plant growth, Vertumnus, in a portion of a painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo around 1591. Arcimboldo was not only the imperial painter but was also entertainment director and fountain designer. A fellow imperial fountain designer was Cornelis Drebbel, who built what is probably the first navigable submarine (possibly with rebreather air supply) and an air-conditioning system. The court also included the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, the medical doctor and botanist Carolus Clusius, and (among others) the aforementioned Tycho and Kepler.

Tycho, the last of the great naked-eye astronomers, is shown at right in an image of a statue in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, where he’s called “The Man with the Golden Nose” (like the gunfighter Tim Strawn in the movie Cat Ballou, he lost his real nose in a duel). He was working for Rudolph on a data book about the orbits of celestial objects with Kepler as his assistant, but his nose wasn’t the only strange aspect of his life. His pet moose, for example, died from a fall down a flight of stairs after drinking too much beer. Tycho, too, might have had a death associated with drinking. At an imperial banquet, he reportedly resisted an urge to urinate and might have died as a result (others have recently suggested mercury poisoning). In any case, Kepler took over the task of completing the Rudolphine Tables.

Based on that work, Kepler published Astronomia Nova (the New Astronomy) in 1609, crediting both Rudolph and Tycho on the title page (left). The highly regarded book contains the first two of Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion: that objects move in elliptical orbits, with the object they’re orbiting at one focus of the ellipse (providing tremendous support to the idea of a sun-centered universe) and that a line connecting the orbital body to the body being orbited sweeps equal areas of the ellipse in equal times.

Those are important scientific laws, but they do not suggest a geostationary satellite orbit. That is suggested in Kepler’s third law. Kepler published eight more books by 1618, but not one of them hinted at the third law. And then there was his mother’s trial for witchcraft.

Kepler undertook his mother’s defense, which meant a long trip from his home to the site of the trial. So he took along something to read, a book on musicology and music theory, published in 1581. That book so influenced Kepler that he wrote and published another book, Harmonices Mundi (The Harmonies of the World), in 1619, before the trial was finished. It contains the third law of planetary motion, the one that makes the calculation of a geostationary orbit possible. It also offers appreciation to the author of the 1581 book for helping to shape Kepler’s thoughts.

That author also helped shape the thinking of another famous scientist, Galileo, whom he taught the importance of experimentation. “It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly.” He also taught Galileo to play the lute, a practice that served the scientist well when he studied acceleration due to gravity by rolling objects down an inclined plane equipped with bumps like the frets on a lute’s neck; Galileo used the sounds of the objects hitting the bumps to determine their velocities. And the author of that 1581 book was responsible for our calling Galileo Galileo in two senses.

The author was Vincenzo Galilei (right). As father, he chose the name Galileo Galilei because it sounded mellifluous. As musician, composer, scientist (he came up with the principles of tuned strings and pipes), historian, and theorist (credited with the principles of opera), he was already a famous Galilei.

That’s why Galileo is called Galileo and what it has to do with our industry. Now you know.

 

Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Early Bird, Emmy, Galileo, geostationary, Goonhilly, Harmonices Mundi, history, John Pierce, Kepler, Potočnik, Rudolph II, satellite, Schlafly, Tsiolkovsky, Tycho, Vincenzo Galilei

3D: The Next Big Thing?

The annual Tech Retreat of the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) is where many new technologies get introduced. Sony reportedly “introduced” its F65 camera and SR-memory technologies at this year’s exhibition of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas in April; more than a year earlier, both were described for HPA Tech Retreat attendees. Panasonic’s Varicam and Sony’s HDCAM SR are just two of the other technologies that were introduced at previous HPA Tech Retreats.

Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) is no exception. The 2011 retreat, last February, saw the introduction of the SRI stereoscopic test pattern (below) and a SoliDDD multiview autostereoscopic display, among many other demos, and a presentation from Germany’s RheinMain University of Applied Sciences showed actual measured crosstalk (ghosting) for many commercial S3D systems, with names named. The 2012 retreat coming up in February is expected to feature an S3D lens adapter for use in almost any PL-mount system and binocular-vision Royal Society Research Fellow Jenny Read, who has degrees in astrophysics, neuroscience, and psychology.

So, is S3D the next big thing in home entertainment? Here’s what appeared in The New York Times: “…this week, a special study group of experts on stereoscopic television is meeting in Washington to try to decide which system should be adopted. Should the group reach agreement, the system it endorses would be proposed to the International Telecommunications Union, which is considering adopting a global standard for 3-D television.”

Yes, that appeared in The New York Times, in an article headlined “3-D TV Thrives Outside the U.S.”

It appeared on April 22.

It appeared on April 22 of the year 1980, more than 30 years ago. And, roughly 30 years before that, on May 3, 1953, Business Week ran the headline “3-D Invades TV,” describing ongoing S3D broadcasts that began that year.

One might think those broadcasts were simply of movies that used color filters (anaglyph) to separate the left- and right-eye views. They weren’t. Color TV was almost nonexistent at the time. Instead, the S3D TV broadcasts that began in 1953 used side-by-side images with a polarizing screen placed over the picture-tube faceplate and prismatic polarized glasses (right) for viewing. And even those weren’t the first S3D television broadcasts.

The 1930 book Fundamentals of Television, by Thomas Benson, begins its section on S3D with the following sentence. “There are, of course, several possible methods of accomplishing stereoscopic television.” The author could be so definitive not only because John Logie Baird had already broadcast S3D television in 1928 (the receiver, with stereoscope viewing device, is shown at left) but also because of the many patents that covered it, such Georges Valensi’s number 577,762 in France in 1922.

If S3D television was first broadcast more than 80 years ago (and was discussed even earlier), why should it be considered the next big thing now? There are some good reasons.

Tiny image sensors now allow side-by-side stereoscopic video acquisition (and that lens adapter at the upcoming HPA Tech Retreat could expand that capability to even more cameras). Digital correction processing now allows differences between image pairs to be changed in production or post.  There are now systems for automatic stereoscopic alignment.  And entropy-based bit-rate-reduction (digital compression) systems now allow two eye views to be recorded or transmitted in much less than twice the rate of a single view.

Then there are display systems. Most modern S3D cinemas use a system involving circularly polarized viewing glasses, with an optical “plate” in front of the projector to switch polarization as appropriate between the alternating left-eye and right-eye views. The system is being suggested for home TVs, too.

Above is a figure from a U.S. patent that covers the polarization-rotation plate system for such S3D viewing. The patent is number 4,541,691, issued to Thomas S. Buzak of Beaverton, Oregon. Some might recognize that location as the headquarters of the test-&-measurement company Tektronix, and, indeed the patent was assigned to them. It was applied for in 1983 and issued in 1985, at a time when Tektronix was in the video-image display business, largely using picture tubes, as can be seen at the left side of another figure (below) from the patent. Tektronix described and demonstrated the system with both direct-view (home TV-type) and projected (cinema-type) displays starting in 1984.

Perhaps the most-advanced form of S3D eyewear is individual goggles with built-in picture displays. They’re not exactly a new idea, either, as this portion of an image (left) from the March 1949 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine shows. The diagonal lines are “rabbit-ears” antennas. In this case, idea is an appropriate description.

Some say any form of glasses is the bane of S3D, especially in homes. They prefer some form of autostereoscopic display, an S3D display that can be viewed without glasses (or other intervention between viewer and screen).

There have been some major developments in this technology recently. If you’ve seen Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, you saw a theoretical eye-tracking autostereoscopic display screen intended to fool a guard. The illusion, unfortunately, gets destroyed when more guards show up, and the system can’t figure out whose eyes to track, causing shifting images.

If, however, you had attended Ian Sexton’s presentation on advanced autostereoscopic displays in the panel “Tomorrow’s 3D: A Glimpse from Today” at 3D World in New York in October, you’d have seen that tracking the eyes of multiple viewers is not really a problem. The prototypical light engine of the European HELIUM3D (High-Efficiency Laser-based multI-User Multu-modal 3D Display) project he described is shown above right.

Of course, HELIUM3D was by no means the first multi-viewer autostereoscopic display. At left (click for a larger view) is the parallax-barrier grid being applied to the screen of a cinema in Moscow prior to its showing of a glasses-free 3D movie, Concert, in February 1941 (right). Glasses-free “Stereo Kino” auditoriums later opened in other cities in and influenced by the Soviet Union.

All S3D viewing-control mechanisms (the ones used to ensure that the appropriate view goes to the correct eye) have historic origins. In the photo of the 1928 S3D TV receiver above, the viewing-control mechanism can be seen to be a Holmes-type prismatic-lensed stereoscope, dating to the mid-19th century. The use of the word anaglyph to describe colored glasses dates to a French S3D-movie system in 1893. Projection of S3D images onto a metallic screen so as to allow the use of polarized glasses dates back at least to 1891.

Perhaps the most popular current form of home S3D TV uses shutter glasses that allow the eyes to see the screen alternately as the different views are displayed. Such shutters require synchronization to the display, usually accomplished through infra-red signaling. Are they, at least, a recent innovation?

The Teleview system (above) premiered at a New York cinema in 1922 (showing an S3D science-fiction movie with special effects). As can be seen from the illustration, each audience member had an individual viewing device. The device was a rapid, synchronized, view-alternating shutter, as shown at left (click on the image for a larger view). But even that wasn’t the earliest active-shutter 3D-viewing system. The recent SMPTE book 3D Cinema and Television Technology: The First 100 Years, edited by Michael D. Smith, Peter Lude, and Bill Hogan, with introductions by Ray Zone, begins with a 1919 paper by the Society’s founder indicating that shutter-based viewing systems were already well known by that date.

Indeed they were! Above is a portion of a drawing from British patent 711, issued March 23, 1853 to Antoine Claudet. The mechanism at the top right shuttled the sliding shutter bar at the top left back and forth so that a viewer looking into the eyepieces shown at the bottom would see the appropriate view in the appropriate eye.

That was probably the earliest form of S3D shuttering, but it wasn’t the earliest S3D photographic motion-picture patent. The latter (but earlier) achievement belongs to Jules Duboscq, an instrument maker who was head of special effects at the Paris Opera. He got that post by creating an electric-light sunrise effect there in 1849, thirty years before Edison’s light-bulb demonstration. To achieve the effect, he had to create not only the illumination system but also a power source for it. Nature magazine later praised his development of a means of precipitating the toxic fumes from the batteries used, so as not to poison the patrons of the opera.

On November 12, 1852, in an addendum to his French patent 13,069, he described a “stéréofantascope” or “bioscope,” an S3D movie system. Coincidentally, the patent addendum describes the first photographic movie system, years before even Eadweard Muybridge’s work.

There is a surviving Duboscq Bioscope S3D motion-picture disc (shown at left, click to enlarge) at the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It has 12 stereo pairs of sequential albumen photographic prints of a steam engine.

Given that we are rapidly approaching the 160th anniversary of S3D moving-image viewing, it might be hard to think of S3D as the next big thing. On the other hand, tomorrow is another year.

Tags: 3d, 3d glasses, 3D World, 3dtv, anaglyph, Antoine Claudet, bioscope, Eadweard Muybridge, eye-tracking, Ghost Protocol, HELIUM3D, HPA Tech Retreat, Ian Sexton, Jenny Read, John Logie Baird, Jules Duboscq, Paris Opera, S3D, Stereo Kino, stereofantascope, Tektronix, Teleview

The Blind Leading

Once upon a time, people were prevented from getting married, in some jurisdictions, based on the shade of their skin colors. Once upon a time, a higher-definition image required more pixels on the image sensor and higher-quality optics.

Actually, we still seem to be living in the era indicated by the second sentence above. At the 2012 Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Tech Retreat, to be held February 14-17 (with a pre-retreat seminar on “The Physics of Image Displays” on the 13th) at the Hyatt Grand Champions in Indian Wells, California <http://bit.ly/slPf9v>, one of the earliest panels in the main program will be about 4K cameras, and representatives from ARRI, Canon, JVC, Red, Sony, and Vision Research will all talk about cameras with far more pixel sites on their image sensors than there are in typical HDTV cameras; Sony’s, shown at the left, has roughly ten times as many.

That’s by no means the limit. The prototypical ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) camera shown at the right has three image sensors (from Forza Silicon), each one of which has about 65% more pixel sites than on Sony’s sensor. There is so much information being gathered that each sensor chip requires a 720-pin connection (and Sony’s image sensor is intended for use in just a single-sensor camera, so there are actually about five times more pixel sites).  But even that isn’t the limit! As I pointed out last year, Canon has already demonstrated a huge hyper-definition image sensor, with four times the number of pixels of even those Forza image sensors used in the camera at the right <http://www.schubincafe.com/2010/09/07/whats-next/>!

Having entered the video business at a time when picture editing was done with razor blades, iron-filing solutions to make tape tracks visible, and microscopes, and when video projectors utilized oil reservoirs and vacuum pumps, I’ve always had a fondness for the physical characteristics of equipment. Sensors will continue to increase in resolution, and I love that work. At the same time, I recognize some of the problems of an inexorable path towards higher definition.

The standard-definition camera that your computer or smart phone uses for video conferencing might have an image sensor with a resolution characterized as 640×480 or 0.3 Mpel (megapixels), even if that same smart phone has a much-higher-resolution image sensor pointing the other way for still pictures. That’s because video must make use of continually changing information. At 60 frames per second, that 0.3 Mpel camera delivers more pixels in one second than an 18 Mpel sensor shooting a still image.

Common 1080-line HDTV has about 2 Mpels. So called “4K” has about 8 Mpels. It’s already tough to get a great HDTV lens; how will we deal with UHDTV’s 33-Mpel “8K”?

A frame rate of 60-fps delivers twice as much information as 30-fps; 120-fps is twice as much as 60-fps. How will we ever manage to process high-frame-rate UHDTV?

Perhaps it’s worth consulting the academies. In U.S. entertainment media, the highest awards are granted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the Academy Award or Oscar), the Academies (there are two) of Television Arts & Sciences (the Emmy Award), and the Recording Academy (the Grammy Award). Win all three, and you are entitled to go on an EGO (Emmy-Grammy-Oscar) trip!

In the history of those awards, only 33 people have ever achieved an EGO trip. And only two of those also won awards from the Audio Engineering Society (AES), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). You’re probably familiar with the last name of at least one of those two, Ray Dolby, shown at left during his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2004.

The other was Thomas Stockham. Some in the audio community might recognize his name.  He was at one time president of the AES, is credited with creating the first digital-audio recording company (Soundstream), and was one of the investigators of the 18½-minute gap in then-President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes regarding the Watergate break-in.

Those achievements appeal to my sense of appreciation of physical characteristics. The Soundstream recorder (right) was large and had many moving parts. And the famous “stretch” of Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods (left), which would have been required to accidentally cause the gap in the recording, is a posture worthy of an advanced yogi (Stockham’s investigative group, unfortunately for that theory, found that there were multiple separate instances of erasure, which could not have been caused by any stretch). But what impressed (and still impresses) me most about Stockham’s work has no physical characteristics at all.  It’s pure mathematics.

On the last day of the HPA Tech Retreat, as on the first day, there will be a presentation on high-resolution imaging. But it will have a very different point of view. Siegfried Foessel of Germany’s Fraunhofer research institute will describe “Increasing Resolution by Covering the Image Sensor.” The idea is that, instead of using a higher-resolution sensor, which increases data-readout rates, it’s actually possible to use a much-lower-resolution image sensor, with the pixel sites covered in a strange pattern (a portion of which is shown at the right). Mathematical processing then yields a much-higher-resolution image — without increasing the information rate leaving the sensor.

In the HPA Tech Retreat demo room, there should be multiple demonstrations of the power of mathematical processing. Cube Vision and Image Essence, for example, are expected to be demonstrating ways of increasing apparent sharpness without even needing to place a mask over the sensor. Lightcraft Technology will show photorealistic scenes that never even existed except in a computer. And those are said to have gigapixel (thousand-megapixel) resolutions!

All of that mathematical processing, to the best of my knowledge, had no direct link to Stockham, but he did a lot of mathematical processing, too. In the realm of audio, his most famous effort was probably the removal of the recording artifacts of the acoustical horn into which the famous opera tenor Enrico Caruso sang in the era before microphone-based recording (shown at left in a drawing by the singer, himself).

As Caruso sang, the sound of his voice was convolved with the characteristics of the acoustic horn that funneled the sound to the recording mechanism. Recovering the original sound for the 1976 commercial release Caruso: A Legendary Performer required deconvolving the horn’s acoustic characteristics from the singer’s voice.  That’s tough enough even if you know everything there is to know about the horn. But Stockham didn’t, so he had to use “blind” deconvolution. It wasn’t the first time.

He was co-author of an invited paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the IEEE in August 1968. It was called “Nonlinear Filtering of Multiplied and Convolved Signals,” and, while some of it applied to audio signals, other parts applied to images. He followed up with a solo paper, “Image Processing in the Context of a Visual Model,” in the same journal in July 1972. Both papers have been cited many hundreds of times in more-recent image-processing work.

One image in both papers showed the outside of a building, shot on a bright day; the door was open, but the inside was little more than a black hole (a portion of the image is shown above left, including artifacts of scanning the print article with its half-tone images). After processing, all of the details of the equipment inside could readily be seen (a portion of the image is shown at right, again including scanning artifacts). Other images showed effective deblurring, and the blur could be caused by either lens defocus or camera instability.

Stockham later (in 1975) actually designed a real-time video contrast compressor that could achieve similar effects. I got to try it. I aimed a bright light up at some shelves so that each shelf cast a shadow on what it was supporting. Without the contrast compressor, virtually nothing on the shelves could be seen; with it, fine detail was visible. But the pictures were not really of entertainment quality.

That was, however, in 1975, and technology has marched — or sprinted — ahead since then. The Fraunhofer Institut presentation at the 2012 HPA Tech Retreat will show how math can increase image-sensor resolution. But what about the lens?

A lens convolves an image in the same way that an old recording horn convolved the sound of an acoustic gramophone recording. And, if the defects of one can be removed by blind deconvolution, so might those of the other. An added benefit is that the deconvolution need not be blind; the characteristics of the lens can be identified. Today’s simple chromatic-aberration corrections could extend to all of a lens’s abberations, and even its focus and mount stability.

Is it a merely a dream?  Perhaps.  But, at one time, so was the repeal of so-called anti-miscegenation laws.

Tags: 4K, ARRI, blind deconvolution, Canon, convolution, Cube Vision, EGOT, Enrico Caruso, Forza Silicon, Fraunhofer Institut, hdtv, HPA Tech Retreat, hyper-resolution, Image Essence, image processing, image sensor, JVC, lens aberrations, Red, Sony, Soundstream, Super Hi-Vision, Thomas Stockham, UHDTV, Vision Research, Watergate tapes