Getting Documents Back From JPEG Scans

We’re all looking for documentation, books, and papers. Sometimes we’re lucky, we find the pristine PDF, rendered fresh from a text processor or maybe LaTeX. Sometimes we’re not so lucky, the only thing we can find is a collection of JPEG images with high compression ratios.

Scans of text are not always easy to clean up, even when they’re well done to begin with, they may be compressed with JPEG using a (too) high compression ratio, leading to conspicuous artifacts. These artifacts must be cleaned-up before printing or binding together in a PDF.

Channel Mixing and Pseudo-Inverses

Let’s say we want to mix three channels onto two because the communication device has only two available channels but we still want to emulate a three channel link. If we can afford coding, then it’s not a problem because we can build our own protocol so add any number of channels using a structured data stream. But what if we cannot control the channel coding at all? In CDs, for example, there’s no coding: there are two channels encoded in PCM and a standard CD player wouldn’t understand the sound if it was encoded otherwise.

The solution is to mix the three channels in a quasi-reversible way, and in a way that the two channels can be listened to without much interference. One possible way is to mix the third channel is to use a phase-dependant encoding. Early “quadraphonic” audio systems did something quite similar. You can also use a plain time-domain “mixing matrix” to mix the three channels onto two. Quite expygeously, let us choose the matrix:

Filtering Noise (Part I)

If you own a car, you probably noticed that the speedometer needle’s position varies but relatively slowly, regardless of how the car actually accelerates or decelerates. Unless your speedometer is some variation on the eddy current meter, maybe the noise from the speed sensor isn’t filtered analogically but numerically by the dashboard’s computer.

Let us have a look at how this filtering could be done.

Deriving the 1 bit = 6 dB rule of thumb

This week, a more mathematical topic. Sometime ago, we—friends and I—were discussing the fidelity of various signals, and how many bits were needed for an optimal digitization of the signal, given known characteristics such as spectrum and signal-to-noise ratio.

Indeed, at some point, when adding bits, you only add more power to represent noise in the signal. There’s a rule of thumb that say that for every bit you add, you can represent a signal with more of signal to noise ratio. Let me show you how you derive such a result.

Debouncing using Binary Finite Impulse Reponse Filter

In digital systems, we expect input signals to be noise free, but that is not always realistic. For example, let us think about an embedded device with a series of push buttons. The user interacts with the device by pressing the buttons, and we would expect, quite naively, that the micro-controller receives either one or zero depending on whether the button is pressed or not.

However, when the user presses a button, there is a short time during which the micro-controller cannot tell for sure whether the button is pressed or not. During this short time, the mechanical switch under the button establishes the contact and (electronic) noise is read. To the micro-controller, this noise appears as a short burst of random ones and zeroes between the button-not-pressed state (or zero) and the button-is-quite-pressed state (or one). The micro-controller has to decide through that burst of random bits when—and if—the button is pressed. The same thing occurs when the button is released.

The noise from the contact is usually somewhat smoothed by a small capacitor-based circuit called a debouncer. The debouncer makes sure that the signal rises smoothly from 0 (not pressed) to 1 (pressed). But even with a debouncing circuit, the signal must go through a phase where its level isn’t quite zero nor quite one, and the micro-controller’s I/O port may read either levels; resulting in multiple, rapid contacts instead of a single, longer, contiguous contact. Naturally, this situation must be avoided; if not by hardware, by software.