Thursday, January 26, 2006

A picture is not worth a thousand words!!!

Personally, I dont think that a picture nowdays is worth a thousand words. Take a look at the picture below. How many words is it worth???


This picture is worth more than a million words...Why???

In digital imaging, we have a term called the 'picture element' or commonly refered to as the pixel. When you snap a photo using your digital camera, what you're actually doing is exposing an array of pixels arranged in an x-y grid to various light intensity levels from the scene you wish to capture. Each pixel then registers these intensity levels as a voltage drops in each corresponding pixel. The amount of voltage drop in each pixel corresponds directly to the brightness in the scene you wish to capture. After your digital camera makes that digitized click sound, you would have a voltage representation of the scene you just captured. Not a piture yet.


Greay Scale

If a picture is developed from these raw voltage levels, you'd get a black and white image of the scene. This is called the gray scale image. The reason is voltage levels simply dont represent color. To get a color image, RGB filters are placed on each pixel in a Bayer Pattern thus each pixel detects either red, green or blue light causing a corresponding voltage drop for that color. However if you extract only the red,blue or green pixels, you'd still get a gray scale image simply because voltage does not contain color information. You'd have to process all three R,G,B pixel voltages through a process called Bayer Interpolation to form your color picture. This works because each R,G,B pixel's voltage drop is proportional to the R,G,B color intensity from the scene. Remember the color filter I told you about??? But all of this can only be done when the picture is made into words...


Bayer Interpolated Color Image

Now for the word. To actually develop an image or store the images, your digital camera would digitize the raw pixel voltage levels into 14 or 16 bit digital data. Each string of digitized pixel data corresponds to a digital word. Now we see one pixel is worth one digital word. Thus if you have a 1.3 megapixel camera, your picture is worth 1,300,000 words... Thats how many words the picture in this blog entry is worth.


This picture is worth it!!!

Todays pictures are not worth a thousand words anymore. Literally, they're worth more. If a picture is worth merely a thousand words, the picture would be extremely dull... Get the picture???

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

like the hair, brapa kali cuci rambut? if teaching doesn't work out u can always venture into modelling.eheh kidding dude

-corn cob-

juwaidah said...

Faiq's smile is very similar to his babah's!!

Anonymous said...

Betul la faiq tu muka juah cam bapak dia gak. Muka ada udang sebalik timun. Nanti dia gi sekolah ko check-check le dia punya beg. kot-kot bawak kertas printer ke, bawak komponen kamera ko tengah buat ke, magnet ke, motor ke... Tak pun bawak cicak lam tupperware. Mana tumpahnya kuah kalau tak ke alas meja yang mahal dan baju warna cerah... Kat nasik tak tumpah nye sebab sendiri tuang.

Anonymous said...

Jangan terkejut la aku ingat benda-benda ni beb. Dulu sekolah rendah kan aku bes fren ko. Birds of a feather, dude. Sama-sama crackheads. hee hee hee. Cuma bila masuk sekolah menengah tu dah terpisah jap dari kelas yang sama. Itu yang masing-masing bawak diri tu aku rasa.

Anonymous said...

wowowoww.. middle aged dudes on a memory lane. hehe..
izhal, anak u mmg muka macam u. my indian friend anak lelaki iras ayah dia so dia kena pakai subang kat sebelah telinga, nak bezakan.. ntah betul ke tak fakta ni:P

-tenma-

Izhal said...

apa komen korang ni? tak de kena mengena ngan topic langsung... hehehe...

juwaidah said...

Topic advance cam ni, cemana aku nak komen?? he.. he..

Anonymous said...

Dude, aku punya komen tu ada kaitan ngan topik sebenarnya. cuma tersirat sikit. Artikel engko ni pasal digital imaging. Sciences. Things that scientists work with. My trip to memory lane was a reminder that our ambitions to be scientists(with all the junk we brought to school to do our own experiments) were realized after all. It's not like I personally imagined it to be, but yes. We ARE what we wanted to be.

Ija said...

faiq kiut cam auntie dia... muahaha!!