Low Fidelity to the Naked Eye

1. I chose to digitalize a picture of Bowser, a video game character. Although this picture is stored as digital information, the eye views the picture presented on the monitor. This is an analogous function of viewing this particular digital data. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that this is a continuous visual, a vector based picture, although it has been rendered to a jpeg.

2. First, the picture of Bowser has a dimension of 1024x1024. In this case I will not worry about the framing, which would be a loss of information, because the picture of Bowser is neatly placed in the center. This picture will be placed on a x and y axis, like any 2d graph, with a set distance between each interval. The quantizing in this situation will be simplified. The distance on the x axis will be divided into 20 parts and the same with the y axis. So, for an instance, (1,1) will represent lowest left box. So the coordinate that is designated a that box is the upper right corner. The sampling in this process will be the dominate of that box. Of course, in order to obtain this data the graph is placed on top of the picture, and each axis marked for easy identification. In the end, the data should look like this,

(1,1) white
(1,2) white
(1,3) white
(1,4) white

… and so on.

3. This set of data is discrete to the coordination of a 20x20 graph which also contains another property, color. Displaying this digital data, one can see the obvious loss of fidelity. The intended preservation of the picture is lost and looks pixilated. As mentioned before, the viewer does not know how the framing is set. In this case I preserved the initial canvas dimension and no rescaling was applied. Taking into consideration the low quantification of the picture and simple sampling process, a larger set of data would greatly increase the resolution and fidelity of the picture. The loss of data is inevitable. However, a note to the original piece. This picture was created in a program that used vector scaling. This solves the continuous property. No matter how far you zoom in, the picture quality is maintained, and the gradient and use of color is scaled accordingly. Does it mean its analogous? It is still in digital form, and no physical impression is imprinted. Our analog eyes is used to visualize the digitalization of Bowser.

Although increasing the sampling size would greatly affect the digitalization of Bowser, one suggestion could be taking the color of the coordinate. Getting the dominant color was not easy to determine due to different shades and hues. This would only stress the substance of the image, instead I feel like there should have been focus on the borders, the lines and shape which has greater priority in this situation then the colors of the image. Hopefully by focusing on the black in this picture would have deceptively had a greater fidelity, or at least more easily recognizable. This can be seen in comparison with the digitalization image of Bowser, the pixelated vs the actual.

images can be found in this link: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/skim31/shared/