Mia: Awesome. Do you have any tips or advice you’d like to share for those starting out in the software?
 
Dan: I’ve always found reaching out to the help desk (support) to be extremely helpful. Early on when I was learning the software, and sometimes now, they point me to the online guide. If it’s a more complicated question, I get an answer back quickly, whether its validation the way I want to use of the software, or something that might become a new feature request.
 
Mia: Yeah, the support team, they’re great. And then, of course, all of our documentation on our website.

Mia: Could you tell me about that photo?

Dan: As I have learned more and more about imaging systems, I have found myself drawn to old film cameras, and developing and processing these images. I was playing with the concept of dragging the shutter to capture the movement. It’s not the image I was visualizing, but I like it.

Mia: Very cool! Thank you so much for your time.
 
Dan: Thank you.

The post Imatest Customer Profile: Dan Bennis appeared first on Imatest.

A: I am currently working as a professional teacher in Shenzhen Polytechnic, teaching courses such as “Digital Image Quality Inspection” and “Image Quality Tuning”.

Q: How long have you been using Imatest? What was the initial opportunity to come across imaster?

A: In 2015, I learned about Imatest from ColorSpace. I later attended Imatest’s technical exchanges and training sessions. It has been almost 8 years now.

Q: Which modules or functions do you use most often?

A: At first, I mainly analyzed ColorCheckers and evaluate the sharpness of smart phone images, etc.. Due to the course research needs, I also gradually explored other modules. Now, I often use modules such as Dot pattern, Distortion, ColorChecker, SFRplus Setup, Stepchart, Uniformity, etc.

Q: I heard that you have also conducted research in color vision and image quality evaluation, what kind of cameras do you pay more attention to? Which image quality parameters do you pay more attention to?

A: Due to the nature of the courses I teach and the research work I do related to the course content, I have some research on color vision, color appearance models, color management, etc. The types of cameras that I have been paying more attention to lately are AI, Automotive, etc. I will pay more attention to parameters such as Sharpness, Noise, Dynamic Range, White Balance, Gamma, and Color saturation.

Q: What kind of comments and suggestions do you have for Imatest software?

A: Imatest software covers many parameters of image quality, general image quality analysis problems can be solved. And the interface operation is friendly to beginners and easy to master. Regarding the suggestions, I feel that the software is slow to start, and some of the Chinese in the old version are not very accurate, this part has been improved in the latest version.I think, it would be better if the operation efficiency could be improved.

Thank you, Professor Xu, for taking the time to be interviewed, and thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions！

About Professor Xiangyang

Xu Xiangyang, PhD, Associate Professor, has been engaged in

teaching and research of digital graphic information processing

technology for 20 years, dedicated to the research direction of color

vision, image quality detection and evaluation. He has published

more than 20 academic papers in domestic and international

journals, obtained more than 10 national authorized patents, and

presided over and participated in more than 20 vertical and horizontal

projects. As the first author, he participated in the formulation of one

national standard and five industry standards. As the host, he has

developed 2 courses in the direction of image quality inspection and

tuning, participated in editing 2 national planning textbooks,

published 1 book in the series of training for highly skilled personnel

as the first author, and won 1 provincial teaching achievement award,

etc.

The post Imatest Customer Profile: Professor Xu Xiangyang, PhD appeared first on Imatest.

What do you do for work?


Tina

I am an Imaging engineer at E-con Systems. At E-con Systems we design and develop embedded cameras for several markets like industrial, retail, and medical domains. My role is to tune the Image Quality parameters and validate it against the standards available for specific target applications.

Mia

How long have you been using Imatest?


Tina

Our association with Imatest dates way back to 2008 where we had purchased our first Imatest Master license. We started using it for some of our customer projects back then. We then took it mainstream to validate all our camera products and it would be fitting to say that we have seen Imatest through its full evolution to what it is today.

Mia

What feature in the software do you find yourself using the most, or is your favorite?


Tina

We use Color accuracy, eSFR ISO, Uniformity and Stepchart modules quite frequently since they form the basis of our products’ IQ reports. One favorite feature that stands out is the multi-image mode which helps us to average the performance across multiple hardware’s of the same Image sensor.

Mia

Are you able to give a brief description of what you use it for?


Tina

Imatest has become an integral part of our product development process. As I mentioned, our products carter a wide variety of applications which require flexibility in terms of the parameters we tune and validate the IQ for. The latest eSFR ISO charts and the modular test stand has helped reduce the hassle of maintaining multiple charts and equipment. With shorter turnaround times for this IQ validation, at each step in our design process we can see the impact in IQ performance. The reports we generate are widely accepted across all the markets and act as true value add for our products.

Mia

Do you have any tips for new Imatest users?

Tina

The interactive models in Imatest i.e., color/tone interactive and Rescharts are great for beginners. These help the user build a better understanding of different possible outcomes and visualize the results better.

Thank you to Tina for participating!

The post Imatest Customer Profile: K. Tina Agnes Ruth appeared first on Imatest.

Could you go into detail about what you do for work?

Russ

Yes, I’m an image quality engineer at Skydio. I design, build, and then tune camera systems.

Russ

How long have you been using Imatest for?

Russ

I’ve been using Imatest for probably three years.

Mia

How did you find Imatest, or how did you get your start using it?

Russ

We worked with a fantastic vendor who did a lot of camera characterizations for us, and the output results were all Imatest–that kind of caught my eye. I enjoyed the analysis tools, and the data outputs were super helpful and easy to digest. I started picking it up and using it as well. A lot of it was through them and then our own team developed the tools. Basically, we saw a vendor, we liked what we saw, and we started to use it ourselves.

Mia

Great, well we’re happy to have you as a customer. Could you give a brief description of what you use it for?

Russ

Yes. We work with a lot of different types of customers that have different requirements, so understanding and measuring camera performance is a key part of what we do. Someone can come to us and say “Hey, we have a spec where we’re trying to see a dime at 2 meters” We can do that subjectively with images, but then we want to tie that back to a number and a specific measurement for designing our next generation of cameras. We’ll find out what camera can see the dime, we then measure it on Imatest charts using your software to analyze it, and come up with an objective number.

Russ

We can also determine how we are doing in regards to noise performance by measuring on your charts across the entire length of the project. When we first get our cameras, before they’re tuned, we measure the noise, the color, pretty much measure everything. Then on a weekly basis, we’ll measure it again, making sure that we’re not regressing and that we’re moving forward with improvement. So overall, we use it for a lot of different things. Some hardware stuff, and then also software stuff.

Mia

It seems like you’re using a lot of different kinds of modules in the software for different purposes. Is there any feature in the software that you find yourself using the most?

Russ

Feature in the software? There’s a multi ROI section basically where we can fill the field view with the target and get multiple points on the field. We can measure different portions of the lens, not just the center, but the corners or the edges to capture how sharp they are. This tool shows us multiple spatial frequencies that allow us to understand how we’re performing. We can look at MTF20 and MTF50 in the same space. Understanding the effective resolution of our models is important to us, so it’s really a handy tool.

Mia

Yeah, for sure. I haven’t heard anybody say that– it’s a great feature. It’s very helpful being able to pinpoint on the image what you want to actually analyze.

Russ

Another feature in the same module are “heat maps” that we use to show active alignments or centering our lens and the sensor. What that chart does is show where your peak focus is, and sometimes if your active alignment wasn’t done correctly, it’s not actually in the center, it’s actually off left a little bit, it allows us to create a feedback loop with our vendors.

Mia

Yeah, for sure. Do you have any tips for new Imatest users?

Russ

Yeah, we really enjoy using Imatest. We like how easy it is to get set up. There’s a lot of different ways to review the information, and not every test is the same. Being able to have a drop down menu with multiple ways to view it and then multiple metrics is super helpful. So if someone’s getting just starting on images, it’s really helpful to load some stuff in and go through each section and try to understand and digest what you’re seeing. Taking a day to go through the drop downs and familiarize yourself and using Imatest documentation to come full circle.

Mia

Definitely. That’s how I started using Imatest. I just started loading random charts in and fooling around with it. 

Mia

Thanks so much for doing this. It was really cool to hear from you.

Russ

All right. Thank you so much.

The post Imatest Customer Profile: Russell Bondi appeared first on Imatest.

Mia

What do you do for work?

Pawel

That’s a tough question because I do a lot for my work. I’m a cinematographer, but also I’m a scientist and inventor. Within cinematography, I not only film images, but I also edit images that I produce. So it’s very difficult to pigeonhole me.

Mia

Is it just you doing everything?

Pawel

Not everything. We’ve got a few teams actually doing different things with the development of cameras. It was just too much for me to do everything and just not possible to do it in such short period of time. It’s definitely a team effort.

Mia

Very cool. How long have you been using Imatest?

Pawel

probably about 20 years. I still have a version that I run on Windows XP virtual machine–so it’s more than since Windows XP.

Mia

Wow, I don’t hear that a lot. You’ve been using it since the beginning, because we’ve been around for about 20 years now.

Pawel

Yes!

Mia

What feature do you find yourself using the most? Perhaps one that you gravitate towards for your work, or one that you found works really well for what you’re doing?

Pawel

So with the work that I do, I’m a little bit obsessed about image sharpness. I’ve been using the MTF and SFR sort of workflow. That’s 90% of what I use Imatest for.

Mia

That one’s definitely good for sharpness. Do you have an example or a use case?

Pawel

There are several use cases, but I do a lot of filming underwater. A limiting factor to image quality is the glass, or the optics. Not many people know that we’re only getting about standard definition quality through just a flat piece of glass simply because of the chromatic aberrations, distortions, astigmatism, and all sorts of other problems associated with it. With the new digital cameras, there’s obviously a big disparity between what glass can produce and what the camera can record. For almost a decade, I’ve been trying to get that optical sharpness up. The only way to do it is to compare it, and in order to compare it, you need to quantify it. I’ve collected a large number of underwater submersible lenses, which are lenses that are designed to produce sharp pictures underwater, but they don’t produce sharp pictures on land. I have inventory of well above 100 lenses. For every lens, I shoot several SFR charts and measure sharpness in the center, mid-frame, edge and corners. This is to be able to cherry pick the lenses.

Pawel

I do a lot of modifications to adapt the lenses for digital sensors, and again, the best way to make those modifications is to be able to test whether you’re actually improving or whether you’re making things worse. All those lenses have MTF charts for many points in a frame, and I can pick up the lens that I think performs best in particular circumstances. So I’ve been using those workflows a lot more recently. I have a test lens that’s extremely sharp–a Sigma 135mm lens. I use that lens as a baseline to compare different digital services and measure the MTF of the actual sensor. That’s only in the center of the frame because the sensor is uniform and the lens performs best in the center of the frame. Those are two main areas that I’ve been using it for.

Mia

Yeah, well, that’s really cool to hear. Cool to hear you are using Sigma lenses too, at least for your baseline test. Those are my favorite.

Pawel

It’s a lens that I actually have. I also have been using a lot of ARRI signature price recently, but they are expensive lenses; they also could be used as a baseline. I just don’t have access to them every day.

Mia

Awesome. How did you get started in imaging science or imaging in general? I know that you said you’re a cinematographer, but you’re also a scientist, engineer, and inventor. What sparked your interest?

Pawel

I’ve been lucky. I had very good general education and I studied, actually, civil engineering, but with a very solid background in physics that allows me to pretty much do anything. With the interest more like a hobby, photographing and filming things sort of turned into a profession that was very much based in science.

Mia

Yeah, I definitely agree. I started out just photography as a hobby, and now here I am. I delved into the scientific aspect of it. It’s really awesome.

Pawel

It’s much easier to turn scientists into very good photographers or cinematographer than teach cinematography with all the math and physics behind it.

Mia

I think especially if you already have that scientific background, it might be easy to translate or throw the artistic aspect into it.

Mia

How did you find Imatest?

Pawel

As I said, I always wanted to improve things. It’s a sort of driver that keeps me going. As I said, if you want to improve something, you need to be able to compare it–you can’t compare it unless you can quantify it. I was on a lookout for ways of analyzing images and at the time there was not much else other than Imatest. Now there are some other packages that claim to do a lot of things that Imatest does, but they’re just not as robust. I think having that history and ability to improve things over time makes it a clearer choice.

Mia

For sure. Maybe I’m biased because I work here and I use it, but yeah, Norman and Henry Koren are so smart and they know so much about image quality. I can understand why it is pretty robust and we’re always looking for ways to improve.

Mia

Are there any other challenges that you faced with image quality testing related to your work?

Pawel

Well, recently with the development of this new camera, we found that we can produce really high resolution images. What I mean by that is we can produce 260 megapixel motion picture, which is 18.7K by 14K resolution. To be able to analyze those quickly and efficiently is certainly a challenge. In the past, I needed to crop to smaller size and analyze bit by bit because it’s quite large.

Mia

Wow, that’s huge!

Mia

That’s all the questions that I have. I know you worked on the new Avatar movie, which is so spectacular.

Pawel

Actually, I had to analyze more than 40 lenses. Every single lens was put on an underwater optical bench with an SFR chart on it. I would shoot several tests and bring them into Imatest to analyze. Those lenses were not just cherry picked for their sharpness, but also for uniformity across the frame. Also, because Avatar was actually shot in 3D underwater, I needed to match those lenses. The two lenses that I actually matched have very similar characteristics, but mirrored because the lenses go on a beam splitter. One lens shoots through a half mirror and one lens bounces off a half mirror, creating two separate images. In order to match those lenses, you’re actually looking for mirrored characteristics in those lenses, but no lens is perfectly symmetrical. I’ve got the lenses in a special box labelled Avatar in case they want to shoot more in the water.

Mia

like I said, it’s really spectacular. I remember seeing the first movie and thinking, “oh, my gosh, this is so beautiful,” and now there’s another coming out. I can imagine it’s going to be very cool.

Pawel

There’s never been a film shot in such way before. The team used, which was my invention, a submersible beam splitter. Prior to this, people were using beam splitters that were housed in underwater enclosure. This is completely different. This beam splitter is completely flooded, and the reason is because it avoids any glass in between. So, there is no limit in resolution. There’s also absolutely no distortions through it, so what you’ll see is images that are completely different. When we first saw those images on set we were like, “Is that underwater? Is that on land?” It just looks unreal. It was underwater, but there’s no distortion. And the peripheral vision is so sharp, crisp, and vivid that is so immersive and just creates this very unique experience.

Mia

I’m very excited to see it, and everybody at Imatest is also excited. We’re happy to be able to work with you and to be able to help with anything. Thank you so much for meeting with me. It’s been a pleasure!

Pawel

Thanks, Mia. Nice talking to you.

The post Imatest Customer Profile: Pawel Achtel, ACS appeared first on Imatest.

Naveen: I’m an image quality engineer. I work mainly on tuning and image quality verification and validation. At present, I’m associated with Nuro.

Mia: How long have you been using Imatest?

Naveen: I have been using Imatest since around 2008.

Mia: Wow, awesome. What feature in the software do you find yourself using the most, or one that you usually gravitate towards?

Naveen: I have mostly used all the features across Imatest. But some features I use are the high dynamic range and noise ones, which are very interesting features Imatest has. Apart from all image quality features, Imatest provides a lot of data in the CSV files and the JSON files, which is quite useful.

Mia: For sure. Do you have any tips for people who are just beginning to use Imatest?

Naveen: Yeah, there’s a lot of very good documentation Imatest provides. Also, I’ve seen a lot of video lectures on YouTube for a beginner to start with and understand the tool well. I will advise, there is a lot of stuff in the CSV and the JSON files which does not get displayed on the images. That is really great data to look at that gives a lot of information about the image quality other than what the output saved images is.

Mia: Yeah, that’s a great bit of information. I make the videos for Imatest that you see on YouTube or on our website, so it’s good to hear they’re helpful. That’s a great idea for a video; showing people how to interpret the JSON files. Thank you so much for doing this!

Naveen: Sure. Thank you.

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The first customer profile is Dr. Brian Deegan. Based in Ireland, Brian is a long-time user who has utilized the Imatest software across multiple disciplines. Read more about our interview with Brian:

Mia: How long have you been using Imatest?

Brian: It must be ten years now at this stage. I started at Valeo in 2011 and have used it throughout my entire career there. I started in university this year and I’m still using it.

Mia: Awesome. And you’re still using it now that you’re at the university?

Brian: Yeah, not as much and not as much directly, but one of the PhD students here is using it as part of this project.

Mia: That’s very cool. Segueing into the next question, what do you do for work?

Brian: I used to work for Valeo vision systems and that’s how Norman [Koren], Henry [Koren], and the team would know me. I was working in automotive image quality, so everything from simple backup cameras to surround view cameras, mirror replacement cameras, cameras for autonomous driving; everything to do with that. In my career I was primarily responsible for, I suppose, image quality, assessment tuning and optimization. So, everything from measuring the sharpness and noise performance of the cameras to trying to get the best image quality for reviewing, machine vision, and performance; that kind of thing.

Mia: What feature in the software do you find yourself using the most or kind of what’s been your favorite feature, if that’s the avenue you want to take it in?

Brian: Yeah, sure. The most common ones that I’ve used would have been the SFR test for measuring the sharpness of the cameras. I’ve used that quite a bit. The step chart tools for measuring color accuracy with the color checker charts as well. I’ve also used the uniformity measurement quite a bit for measuring the color and shading uniformity of lenses. So, those that have been the ones that I’ve used most commonly. There are other ones I’ve used as well for measuring aliasing using the wedge targets, and I use some of the newer ones for the ISO-16505 standard. I do use some of the dynamic range measurements and some of the CPIQ measurements–less often, but I do use those too.

Mia: Well that’s very cool. It seems like you got to cover a lot of the software.

Brian: Yeah. I know that you mentioned features that that I liked: I like the chart order feature. So obviously yours is everywhere, Imatest manufacturers test targets. But every now and again it’s nice to just print off a chart, quick and dirty, for doing quick tests. The chart order function has proved very useful over the years. Another one that’s nice—it’s basically an image quality simulator where you can simulate different MTF curves for illustration and demonstration purposes.

Mia: Cool, thank you. Being that you’re in the image quality industry directly, is there any direction you’d kind of like to see Imatest go?

Brian: Not particularly as such. In terms of image quality assessment, there’s only a handful of companies that are involved, and Imatest is one of the leaders in the area. I’ve given feedback over the years as time has gone by. But you know, a team like Norman and Henry, and even Paul Romanczyk, they go to the standards meetings and are heavily involved. Whatever is going on in the industry, Imatest has had people that are either at the conferences or involved with the standards. So I think in terms of the developments that are going on in the industry, it’s safe to say Imatest has a reasonable, good finger on the pulse from that point of view. In terms of features and stuff like that, I suppose a couple of years ago I would have said that Imatest weren’t as good as some of the competitors in terms of some of the hardware, Imatest was more refined for targets and software. However, that gap has closed in the last few years.

Thank you to Brian for his valuable feedback and participation!

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