Thing-a-day.com

happy friday everyone. here are some love tanks.

digital fun

Yesterday’s Thing was a breath controller- blow into it to control the volume of today’s Thing: the Fish Organ, so named because the box used to contain smoked fish. And it sounds a little something like this.

The keyboard is copper tape cut to shape. It’s tuned (approximately) to the twelve tone Just scale based on 2’s, 3’s, and 5’s. When the little red plug is plugged into the "No breath" jack, the thing plays at full volume without the breath controller.

embedded by Embedded Video

Alright, with a little help from my friend I was able to get starting in converting the image sequence of black images into high-contrast grayscale images. Now starts the daunting task of figuring out how to figure out what the digital camera noise signature is. And once that I think I have done this, I then need determine a way to prove it. I have a few ideas of how to start, but I still need to give it a little more thought.

If you watch the animation above long enough you can start to see some general patterns start to emerge (or you would if the compression didn’t suck). Could this pattern simply be the noise signature? Also, the video above may be too low-res to notice, but there are a couple colorful pixels almost stationary towards the bottom right hand corner of the screen. At first I thought this might be a blemish on the camera, but I feel as though a blemish would block light and make those pixels black, not bright and colorful (the brightness should be an indication of light and the color indicates a noticeable variation in the RGB values… which logically should be an indication of light). Anyway, what could that be about?

Today I’ve started my epic journey towards identifying and removing a camera’s unique digital noise signature. The first step involved taking a large sample of pictures of a black backdrop in a pitch black closet (actually, the real first step was making a time-lapse camera).

What it a digital noise signature?
It’s a unique digital fingerprint that the hardware in your camera unintentionally embeds in every picture you take.

Why identify it?
I need to be able to identify it in order to be sure that I am removing it from the image.

Why remove it?
The reason to remove it is simple; to keep an image from being traced back to a particular camera. Having an untraceable image could be useful in many contexts. For instance, it can be a very important tool for maintaining a free, impartial and (if necessary) anonymous press without the fear of persecution

Any which way… more on all of this to come.

 i felt loopy at work today. now i’m drunkst on wine. happy friday!

Jin is one of three main characters in Shinichiro Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo. This is a scene from episode 25, Evanescent Encounter (Part 2).

Ever since my grandfather decided that his digital camera was broken because he kept chopping off people’s heads, I’ve had an extra digital camera. I’ve been wanting to turn it into a time-lapse camera for a while… and now I have.

The camera has a 2-pin socket installed in the side for easy connect/disconnect and is currently being controlled by an Arduino. It can be controlled by any old micro controller, but I am on a mission to figure out this Arduino thing. The only extra component needed is a 5V relay.

Check out the Instructable to make your own!

Code as follows:

/* Time-Lapse Camera Controller
* ——————
*
* Hits a camera shutter at a set interval
* for time-lapse photography. The rate of the
* delay can be manipulated for unique effects.
*
* Created 5 February 2008
* by Randy Sarafan
* http://www.randysarafan.com
*
*/

int camPin = 7; // sets the camera shutter pin
int stupidvar = 30000; // sets the delay between pictures

void setup()
{
pinMode(camPin, OUTPUT); // defines pin as an output
}

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(camPin, HIGH); // presses the button
delay(5000); // waits
digitalWrite(camPin, LOW); // release the button
delay(stupidvar); // delay between pictures

//stupidvar = stupidvar + 1000 // increments delay by one second for unique effect.

}