I DCC and You Can Too
Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 11:20PM Hi everyone!
This coming spring, we'll be attending that bastion of old guard source coders, the Digital Compression Conference (DCC). I'm curious to know if anyone from the CS community will be in attendance. Maybe we could talk CS and where things are going over some hot cocoa? (Scratch that...dark as night coffee only for me).
There hasn't been any specific schedule released for the conference yet, so I am unsure if there will be any presentation session specific to CS. There are no parallel sessions at DCC, so it’s definitely a great opportunity to "spread the gospel" as it were.
In reading some of the reviews we got back on our paper, and I don't know if others are seeing this too, but there seems to be some misunderstandings that folks working on traditional systems have when it comes to CS. It seems like there is always a question from this group about a lack of "rate-distortion" comparisons when it comes to CS. Also, there is an insistence to compare against traditional coding systems (i.e. JPEG, JPEG2000, H.264). This topic is something that I really want to hit during our talk at DCC: that CS isn't a traditional coding system.
I know that seems really obvious to the CS community, but it seems that this misunderstanding is standing in the way of wider acceptance of CS methodology. The fact that CS offers not just computationally light encoding, but rather no computation encoding, seems to be lost on many in the traditional community. It will take some time for the adjustment in thinking, however, because hard-hitting heavy computation encoders have been such a fact of life in the field that the assumption that sensing systems have to have some kind of computational overhead is just taken for granted.
Because of this assumption, many simply flip to the back of many a CS paper and say “But wait...JPEG/H.264 can do better than this, why would I use this convoluted system? What a bunch of hype!” and then throw the journal to the ground and stomp away angrily to write blog entries and poetry (this is my imagination, now).
It’s like fighting the misconceptions that CS is “in-painting” (that you Wired…), we’ve got to tackle these false assumptions that people have about what CS is. Once they understand and have that “Aha!” moment when they say “Wait…this means I can…”, then we have a new CS author :)