Pixel Inventor Goes Back To the Drawing Board

lawpoop writes "Russell Kirsch, inventor of the square pixel, goes back to the drawing board. In the 1950s, he was part of a team that developed the square pixel. '"Squares was the logical thing to do," Kirsch says. "Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.' Now retired and living in Portland, Oregon, Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels.'"

Comments

Re:Suffering ?

[eldavojohn]

Why are we suffering from it since so ?

I did not read the article, so I don't know if it's answered there.

It is now apparent that for a comparable amount of information stored, a more complex algorithm (with maybe even N passes required) could be employed to produce better results to the human eye. To me, this article seems to miss the beauty of keeping it simple and going with the square. I would also bet that all of his examples are done by starting out on a square based pixel image. How would one scan an image in one pass with his new suggested method? This might become a better standard but I would wager it would make a lot of things computationally more expensive and displaying the images more complex. Not to mention manipulation of the image gets a bit trickier and probably throws a monkey wrench in a lot of our widely implemented compression technologies that already produce this sort of "creative blocks" of multiple pixels.

I'm not an expert in this field and I find his further research neat and mildly innovative but I would bet that when it comes down to weighing the practicality of implementation that squares remain.

Square pixels is not the real problem

[Locke2005]

The current problem is that on an LCD display, the Red, Green, and Blue pixels are adjacent to each other, not co-located. Coming up with a scheme to make all 3 colors appear to emanate from the exact same point would be a useful development.

Re:He didn't invent this

[gstoddart]

Did you RTFA?

In fact, I did.

He took a higher resolution image and made two SMALLER images

Actually, if I understand it, he made a higher resolution image by turning "the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels", if I understand correctly, twice a many pixels.

Kirsch’s method assesses a square-pixel picture with masks that are 6 by 6 pixels each and looks for the best way to divide this larger pixel cleanly into two areas of the greatest contrast

I think, he has actually upscaled the images and used his technique to actually do the mythical CSI image enhancement.

Kirsch has also used the program to clean up an MRI scan of his head. The program may find a home in the medical community, he says, where it’s standard to feed images such as X-rays into a computer.

I don't get the impression at all that he's making smaller images. I get the impression that he's actually pulling detail out of the image with the jaggies, and getting a clearer image. The end result is actually more pixels, not less.

However, that's just my best interpretation -- I'm entirely willing to concede that I'm wrong. I'm actually trying to figure it out. :-P

It is entirely possible that he is ending up with the same number of variable pixels which gives more apparent detail, just with better alignment.