2009-05-19

noise and bandwidth

Adrian Price-Whelan (NYU) and I worked on the figures and text for our short paper on the bandwidth with which images should be communicated and saved—or the smallest difference in pixel values that should be permitted by the representation. We find that there should be one or two bits spanning the noise, and that is all. All of the information, on sky level, variance, source positions, and even on sources that lie below the noise level (!) is preserved even when there is only two bits spanning the noise. This has implications for experimental or instrument design, and especially space missions. I don't think our results are really new; many of them exist in the stochastic resonance literature.

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