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Our product design and development blog focuses on sharing our experience and knowledge across a wide range of technologies and industries including hardware and software design, audio, video, internet of things, mobile application and signal processing technologies.

Mike Perkins How Robust Is Audio Perception in the Face of Deliberate Magnitude and Phase Distortions? (Part 3) Audio By Mike Perkins In the first post of this three-part series, I listed four points that I hope my readers will agree with at the end of this series. The second post addressed the first two points of the four. In this post, Part Three of the series, I will demonstrate the final two points: Phase distortions generally… View Article Details
Mike Perkins How Robust Is Audio Perception in the Face of Deliberate Magnitude and Phase Distortions? (Part 2) Audio By Mike Perkins In this post I will demonstrate that dramatically different time domain waveforms can lead to virtually the same audio perception, and two waveforms with identical spectrograms can sound quite different. Details
Mike Perkins Spectral Analysis with the DFT Signal Processing By Mike Perkins You may have encountered spectral analysis. The basic idea is to take a waveform, in our case an audio clip, and determine which frequency components are in it. This post provides a very brief overview of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), spectrograms and DFT spectral analysis. Details
Howdy Pierce How to Measure the Bitrate of a Video Stream Video By Howdy Pierce Occasionally we need to measure the bitrate of a particular video stream on the network. In this example I will show how to measure the data rate of a video streamed from Amazon.com. Details
Howdy Pierce The Future of Clutter Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce If you’re looking to predict what technologies will be obsolete soon, visiting the Kodak booth at CES is not a bad place to start. I came to this realization as I was watching a demo from one of Kodak’s partners, Unibind. Unibind is demonstrating a new machine at CES that allows retailers to create a… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce We’ve Moved Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce I’m a little late in posting this here, but it’s been a busy couple of months. As has already been reported in the local press, Cardinal Peak moved in late September. We’ve been adding some folks in the past year, and we had outgrown our previous location. But we also had a couple of other… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce Using Lossy Video Compression in the Courtroom Video By Howdy Pierce I’m at the DSI conference in Las Vegas today, presenting a primer for law enforcement investigators on how video compression works and trying to answer the question of why “lossy” compression should be considered reliable for use in courtrooms. The lack of trust in digital media compression in a forensic setting is primarily a PR issue for the media compression industry — if such an industry can be said to exist. We use terms like “lossy compression” and “predicted blocks” — terms that have relatively precise technical meaning. But these terms also have a slightly different meaning to laymen, and that everyday meaning isn’t exactly reassuring if you’re a judge relying on testimony compressed using a lossy compression algorithm. Details
Mike Perkins Using Royalties to Pay for Engineering Services Outsourced Engineering By Mike Perkins At Cardinal Peak, we are willing to include royalties as part of our compensation under certain circumstances, but there are powerful constraints limiting our appetite for such deals. So in this post, I’ll explain a few of our reservations about royalties. Details
Using Windows Movie Maker With the Kodak Zi8 Video By Ben Mesander Learn how to edit HD videos from your Kodak Zi8 using Windows Movie Maker with our step-by-step guide and codec tips. Enhance your editing skills today! Details
Mike Perkins Why We Engage on a Time-and-Materials Basis Outsourced Engineering By Mike Perkins When a prospective customer calls us, they generally have one of two engagement models in mind: time and materials (T&M), or fixed price. This post explains why Cardinal Peak strongly prefers T&M engagements to FP ones — and why savvy customers should, too. Details
Howdy Pierce ElcomSoft’s Hack of Image Authentication Software Development By Howdy Pierce Discover the flaw in Nikon’s image authentication system and the implications for security. Learn why true file integrity relies on more than checksum protection. Details
The H.264 Sequence Parameter Set Video By Ben Mesander The H.264 bitstream includes the Sequence Parameter Set (SPS) and the Picture Parameter Set (PPS). Both entities contain information that an H.264 decoder needs to decode the video data, for example, the resolution and frame rate. Details
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