Blogs

“Characterization” can mean many things (I’m particularly fond, especially in this context, of the OED’s “creation of a fictitious character or fictitious characters”).

A day after running our Characterisation Hackathon (and helping out with a lively DPC event on PDF/A-3) and I'm still feeling exhausted. This was a developer only event and not as taxing on my facilitation skills as our usual mashups, but it's still been an action packed few days.

After a year predominantly focussed on external SCAPE events (Open Research Challenges Workshop @ iPres, the First SCAPE Training Event in Guimarães) we finally organised another project internal scenario and developer’s workshop.

Part of my work on the SCAPE testbeds involves producing a workflow for the large scale migration of TIFF to JP2 files, with validation.  The tests I have run all involve the lossy compression of files.

Two tools that could be used for the validation of image payload, and therefore success of a migration, are Matchbox, developed for SCAPE by AIT, and ImageMagick’s “compare” tool.  One of Matchbox’s tests gives a result of SSIM, a value between 0 and 1.  The metric I chose to use from “compare” was PSNR, a value in decibels.