Vector Vengeance: British Claim They Can Kill the Pixel Within Five Years 221
MrSeb writes "The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British are to be believed, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with vectors. If you know about computer graphics, or if you've ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on. At the moment, bitmaps are used almost exclusively in the realm of digital media — but that isn't to say they don't have their flaws. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps don't scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business. Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors (PDF)."
Vectrex LIVES! (Score:5, Interesting)
The return of the glorious Vectrex!
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Tempest! (Score:2)
The reason to have a Vectrex. It only works right with the knob.
But (Score:5, Funny)
But, if there are no pixels, how will I detect photoshops? I've seen quite a few in my day...
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You can tell from the polynomials.
My dad used to say... (Score:4, Funny)
Terrible summary (Score:5, Informative)
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Funny)
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
No no, they also specify a hardware appliance of several algorithmically aware lasers that will dance around in a box to the exact specification of the vector design, and it would generate a new frame as fast as the light could get from one end to the other. It was on page p[k_, n_] := ((k - 2) n (n + 1))/2 - (k - 3) n;
Finally at last (Score:2)
No no, they also specify a hardware appliance of several algorithmically aware lasers
Finally a monitor properly able to repair my dead Asteroids arcade cabinet.
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Actually the newest displays are so high density most people's eyes can't resolve the pixels, so an iPad might as well be a vector monitor.
Only if you follow the marketing speak which adds a couple of assumptions about how far away your eyes will be from the screen and such.
No, the iPad is nowhere near to be equivalent to a vector monitor.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
Vector monitors [wikipedia.org] to the rescue!
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They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
Vector monitors [wikipedia.org] to the rescue!
And since this is only for a video format, we'll also need to bring back Display Postscript [wikipedia.org] for our user interface elements!
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What do you mean, "bring back?" OS X (and, I assume, IOS) still use Display Postscript!
(OK, so they actually use Display PDF, which is a subset, but still...)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEY7SHVm9KI [youtube.com]
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Theoretically, all CRTs can be used to display vector graphics.
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What is this "CRT" of which you speak? Where would I find one, outside of a museum?
Teribad summary (Score:2)
The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
Agreed. The title is very misleading. Also, since this is just going to be generating vector gradients to interpolate fill values, wouldn't you essentially get the same effect by up-sampling a bitmap and as part of the scaling process, run some sort of algorithm to figure out color averages between the old pixels to create smooth blends in the new image? It seems like just another way to approach this problem.
Since all of our input hardware is still going to have to take in information samples in some s
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The same could be said about mp3. Just like mp3 is compressing data in frequency domain instead of time domain, this codec changes pixel grid representation into vector representation.
Re:Teribad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
All current input hardware uses fairly rectangular input grids. However, this is often far from the truth. A digital camera contains pixels, but each pixel is covered by a color filter. In a JPEG from the camera, all pixels are represented (and compressed), but some information is already only a result of interpolation. This is one reason for why RAW is preferable, no lying about the information around. One could make hexagonal sensors or sensors with varying pixel density for a greater and more affordable field of view, or weird lens designs where the projection is not rectangular. If you have vector or mesh-free image data you have much greater freedom in designing both input and output methodology.
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If by input hardware you exclusively mean scanners and cameras.
What about content created directly?
Directly? Please clarify (Score:2)
Implicit grid (Score:3)
Mice [...] report back changes in position, but there is no grid involved.
These changes in position are in units called "mickeys", or discrete counts along the X and Y axes, and mouse performance is often measured in "dpi", or how many mickeys are returned for a movement of 25.4 mm. The Cartesian product of the possible changes in X and Y implies a grid.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The fault lies with the university's PR department this time. It appears they took an off-handed comment about pixel-based codecs being completely surpassed in half a decade, and sound-bit it as "the pixel will be dead in five years." Extremetech didn't exactly help things along, either.
I'm somewhat confident that if someone had invented a continuous method of storing and displaying images, it would be picked up by somewhat more prominent sources.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:4, Funny)
The fault lies with the university's PR department this time.
Obligatory PHD Comics strip: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 [phdcomics.com]
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I also got initially excited about vector displays... and frankly, I don't see anything special about video compression with vectors. Compression is already done by other mathematical descriptions, such as Fourier/cosine transforms. In fact, there are MP3 decoders that give "extra" precision on output, because the stored sinusoidal wave has no resolution limit, even if it came from low-res samples initially.
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I also got initially excited about vector displays... and frankly, I don't see anything special about video compression with vectors...
Apples and oranges, surely.
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But... but... but...
With a different title it wouldn't be as sensationalist! >:(
Obligatory NeXT reference (Score:3)
The original 1987 NeXT workstation already used [wikipedia.org] vector graphics (Postscript) to display virtually everything on the screen. When NeXT became OSX, they had to remove the Postscript because Adobe's licensing charges were too large.
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The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
This is /. were you expecting anything else?
First thought: Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably what happened is someone came up with a good raster->vector converter that does some cool things in their lab, and the technologically ignorant British tabloid journalist went to town on it.
Re:First thought: Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Probably what happened is someone came up with a good raster->vector converter that does some cool things in their lab
Yeap, if you read the actual paper, that's exactly what happened. It's not obvious how it is particularly better than any other technique, either; the scaled images in the paper don't look much different than images scaled normally. Vector drawings give extra information on how to scale; information that you're not going to be able to derive from a photograph.
It isn't the British tabloid journalist who is to blame for the sensationalism, though, because when they asked the Professor who wrote the paper, this is what he said:
“This is a significant breakthrough which will revolutionise the way visual media is produced. To accelerate this project we’ll need companies from around the world to get involved...[and] increase the potential applications of this game-changing research.”
The press is following his lead.
Re:First thought: Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First thought: Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
You are thinking of what "The Press" used to mean.
Today they are partisan PR firms. Although they do well at demanding respect.
Not so well at earning any though.
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It isn't the British tabloid journalist who is to blame for the sensationalism, though, because when they asked the Professor who wrote the paper, this is what he said:
“This is a significant breakthrough which will revolutionise the way visual media is produced. To accelerate this project we’ll need companies from around the world to get involved...[and] increase the potential applications of this game-changing research.”
Rough translation: "I'm full of shit, but if you send cash, I promise to polish the turds."
get ready for some Tempest 2017 (Score:5, Funny)
get ready for some Tempest 2017
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get ready for some Tempest 2017
Quick, someone page the Yak. Or tweeter him. Or however the cool kids get their favorite developer's attention.
maybe I am missing something (Score:3)
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Almost certainly you're right. But there did used to be vector monitors. It seems rather unlikely to me that we'd go back to them, but who knows?
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excuse my ignorance if I am off base but Isn't a vector just a different way of targeting your pixels on the screen? isn't this just a different way of describing which pixels to activate? and if so how does this remove the need for pixels?
Assuming you're still using a raster display, yes. I mean, you can just fire up Inkscape or Illustrator and get a vector-based engine that renders to a raster display. Or just use KDE's Plasma widgets.
Now, if you're on a vector display, THAT'S a different story. Then you get actual lines and curves and such. Such things existed back in The Day(tm). The arcade game Asteroids, in fact, was meant to be played on a vector display. Lunar Lander, Battlezone, the original Atari Star Wars tie-in, all of those
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excuse my ignorance if I am off base but Isn't a vector just a different way of targeting your pixels on the screen? isn't this just a different way of describing which pixels to activate? and if so how does this remove the need for pixels?
Actually, vector graphics targets particular lines, i.e. vectors, on your screen. Of course, as pixel count approaches infinity, the distinction gets less meaningful. And if you're showing vector graphics on a matrix-type display, your vectors are gonna get interpolated into pixels.
You could display vector graphics on other types of displays, like scanning onto a phosphorescent coated surface or projecting on something semi-transparent or semi reflective (old-school, like the 4014), or even shooting frickin
The only thing i want to know (Score:2)
Will it be patent-walled?
Translating between cameras and displays (Score:2)
Is this going to make it harder to translate pictures from cameras to displays? I understand that displays will still have pixels, it's just the drawing that is different (AIUI). But cameras detect and report pixels, not vectors. Wouldn't it be better to translate those camera pixels directly to display pixels, instead of storing some information suitable forvector analysis?
I may be completely ignorant here, knowing just enough to be dangerous to my reputation :-)
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Maybe they intend to be able to clean up each edition of the big book of British smiles much easier each time it is released.
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Originally raster came from scanning CRTs, but in computer graphics terminology, raster == bitmap. JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, etc are "raster image" formats, vs. a "vector image" format.
But I'd argue that the retina really isn't a pixel array, either (though it is massively parallel). While it does have a discrete number of photorecepters (of course), the analogy of the process of going from those receptors to creating a mental image in your brain "as pixels" is about as accurate as the analogy of your memory a
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Yeah, not real. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vectors are accurate as long as you've described the vector completely accurately.
If you're defining a curve, unless it's a simple geometric curve, you'll need to define the parameters of that curve and they just don't stop: they're fractal.
How big a set of parameters do you think it would take to define MERELY THE OUTLINE of a squirrel?
So you're just as limited by vectors as you are with bitmaps. You're going to have to approximate.
Re:Yeah, not real. (Score:5, Interesting)
How big a set of parameters do you think it would take to define MERELY THE OUTLINE of a squirrel?
All estimates of the length of any coastline are wrong. They vary widely depending on how many curves are taken into account. Without adequate smoothing, the length of the coast of Norway is infinite. With adequate smoothing, it's a few miles.
Not necessarily. (Score:2, Informative)
Infinitesimals added an infinite number of times add up to an undefined number. It may be infinite, it may be finite, but you can't say it is definitely one or the other unless you have already counted it up.
See Zeno's Paradox.
See also Atomic theory. At some level there is no more coastline, just a circle around an atom. Definitely smaller than norway's macro-scale accorded length of coastline.
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How big a set of parameters do you think it would take to define MERELY THE OUTLINE of a squirrel?
That depends on how long the relevant parts of its DNA are. :D
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If you're defining a curve, unless it's a simple geometric curve, you'll need to define the parameters of that curve and they just don't stop: they're fractal.
Not only that but then you still have to selectively light up the display's RGB picture elements AKA pixels. So, no, we won't be rid of the "pixel" anytime soon, not even if the internal storage format is vectors. Even if the display used different layers of colored phosphors excited by multiple different beams striking from different angles to create the RGB (or whatever) color space, the convergences would still be pixelated due to the rasterized placement of the overlapping picture elements (pixels).
What's your vector, Victor? (Score:3)
So they replaced pixels with a two-dimensional grid of sqare vectors that scale in width and height to grid width(or height) divided by the number of square vectors on the grid?
Actually just skimmed TFA and it looks like they have an interesting model - they separate the three channels and then fit vector "contours" around the different levels of brightness for each channel. The finer you need control, the more contours you add and the more explicitly you define the the polygons. Looks like a promising, workable solution.
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Using curve fitting like that is a common existing approach to scaling pixels. It can be done on a regular pixel image. It has nothing to do with vector storage like the article summary implies.
And cold fusion will be here in 6 years... (Score:2)
..."At the moment there’s very little information about VSV"... ..."there should be working demonstrations of VSV within the next three to six months"... ..."Performance is awful"...
Yeah, this is DEFINATELY the kind of thing that will cause all current digital cameras and monitors to be obsolete within 5 years.
Or, it may get them an investment from some gullible investors that will then disappear into 'continued research due to unanticipated complications" for a few years, followed by "the pixel indus
Why hate on pixels? (Score:4, Funny)
Just to spite them, i am going to republish their PDF using a 1024x14576 .bmp file.
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Then paste the BMP into a Word doc.
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Then paste the BMP into a Word doc.
I was thinking Excel, for the coup de grâce of technological misapplication. (i see this all the time, unfortunately)
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Then paste the BMP into a Word doc.
I was thinking Excel, for the coup de grâce of technological misapplication. (i see this all the time, unfortunately)
As crazy as it might sound, Excel is the better choice for presentation, though the storage is probably the same.
If you use Word then you're limited to a certain page size, if you use Excel you have effectively infinite pages.
It's wrong, it's crazy, but it works and easy to do for the less technically minded.
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Then paste the BMP into a Word doc.
For greater confusion, paste it into Inkscape (or another vectorial drawing program).
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Then paste the BMP into a Word doc.
Then open that word doc in openoffice and re-export it as PDF.
WINNING
There is a reflection on that hubcap... (Score:5, Funny)
Are they going to invent vector based FPAs too? (Score:2)
I can believe there is some interesting work being done in the algorithms that guess these things, and leveraging work done in the fields of machine vision and astronomy may translate to a video compression algo
UIs (Score:2)
I have been wondering for several years about why we dont have vector based UIs. The 2d accelerators should be good enough to draw vector window objects and such... Why has this languished?
The point about display sizes is accurate (Score:2)
I bought myself a nice retina mac recently. Likely the last mac I'll ever buy unfortunately. Apple is becoming too despotic for me to support even if their laptops are still open enough for me to consider using.
But that aside, I'm very disappointed to learn that Apple has to play a number of tricks to deal with applications that are written to do things in pixel units. I found this to be something of a surprise. I thought developers were better than that nowadays.
I've not done much application development,
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It's really disappointing that so many applications (web pages most emphatically included in this list) decide that things should be sized in terms of pixels.
Anything using images as a major component of a web design pretty much needs pixel dimensions for things to line up properly and/or to avoid ugly scaling issues.
There is no elegant way around it.
IMHO, if you MUST use a bitmap for something, use one that's way obnoxiously large for any display you might anticipate using, then scale it to the right dev
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IT IS A WEB PAGE NOT A FRIGGING POSTER.
Look I'm with you in principle, but that war is lost. It hasn't been a "web page" for 2 decades.
Its 2012. Its a web application, with htlm5, animation, javascript, and asynchronous events, and yes pixel perfect rendering.
Web design is not the same as designing a poster. But it is done by the same set of asshat clowns who, having come from a "design background" that is still wedded to the idea that the "artist" paints the forms and the "plebian" goes gooey over it.
A we
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Actually, a surprisingly large amount of the time I end up hacking a page to pieces in the browser's HTML editor until the visual cruft goes away and I have something I can read. ;-) I'm likely not a typical user though.
Kill Pixels in Five Years? Yeah Right! (Score:3)
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I had a laptop in the 90s that liked to kill pixels all the time.
I had a laptop until 3 years ago that liked to kill vectors. Straight, vertical, thin lines (1 / 1400 of screen width).
Still need to take pixels into account (Score:2)
There is something to be said about lines being drawn with 1 pixel height or width even if they are vector graphics.
Makes things look nice and crisp.
== edit ==
just realized this was about video codecs
Most likely (Score:2)
The BBC will report that the reason behind global warming stems from the use of pixels instead of vectors because of the added energy overhead of processing millions of pixels instead of only thousands of endpoints.
Five years ago (Score:2)
We had the tecnology to easily do this over five years ago. How is this news? Until developers stop using bitmaps instead of vectorized graphics and relative units, this won't change either.
What is this shit? (Score:2)
Gosh, I hope the next monitor I buy will have enough vectors to support this futuristic technology. I probably need to hurry, do you think pixels will be dead before the end of the year?
frame rates? (Score:2)
WTF do frame rates have to do with raster vs vector?
Motion interpolation (Score:2)
It is slightly beyond my imagination (Score:2)
I get the idea in principle but I disagree with it in practice. The main reason why is the source.
Current digital and even analog video recording techniques capture frames in a two-dimensional format. Vector graphics while superior for many things, is not the one-size-fits-all format that many fans want to think it is. In the case of film, images are captured as an analog recording onto photosensitive film. Image density and quality varies on the quality of the material capturing the image. In the case
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A means for capturing images as a native vector formatted data stream escapes my imagination.
I'm thinking some kind of sci-fi laser scanner. But the direct output of that is more like a 3D bitmap, not a bunch of vectors...
It'll never work (Score:3)
Anigao Girls (Score:2)
Unless the world is willing to all convert to anime porn
You'd be surprised. Some people have converted to anime porn so thoroughly that they've even converted to anime dating. See #4. Anigao Girls [cracked.com].
polygons, not sprites (Score:2)
To a large degree, we are already there. 3D graphics processing is done in vector and matrix representations. Sprites are dead. It's all about polygons. Eventually, it does need to be rasterized to a pixel based monitor, but 3D geometry is all vector based. Unless you are using some weird voxel engine.
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What I want to know... (Score:2)
Tektronix did this in the 80s (Score:2)
They're about 20 years late (Score:2)
Nothing can die in 5 years (Score:2)
The better your idea and the more compelling it is, the less likely that pixels will die in 5 years. Because the better your idea, the more likely you've patented your vector codec thingie, so nobody will be allowed to implement it for 20 years. "promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences," indeed.
No it's not a compression technique... yet (Score:3)
On the other hand the fixed contour level setting strategy resulted in file sizes 10x larger than their pixel equivalents which we did not attempt to address in the work being reported here....
We have also (knowingly) been far too conservative in the numbers of contours we find, possibly by as much as a factor of 20, but it will take a (much more complex) adaptive encoder to find the local optima. Compression is an obvious focus for future work.
Our original concern was to be able to reproduce photographic images from contour form so that they looked visually indistinguishable from the original. In this we were generally successful.
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In fairness, the editors are probably a team of American. Only reason to think of anything Britishes is when there's a tasty morsel in need of a good hard extradition.
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2D picture elements
[2D picture] elements, not 2D [picture elements]
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Are JPEG images necessarly tied to pixels? If they store images as just a bunch of cosine waves added together, can't they in theory be resolution independent?
Yes, in theory that is possible. But rendering the JPEG directly at a larger size isn't going to look any better than rendering it at the usual size and then upsampling it. In fact, it would probably look worse, because if you upsample, you at least get some interpolation that might help smooth the JPEG block artifacts -- if you render the image dir
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Get us clearance, Clarence.
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Roger. Over.