Re: [boost] GIL - Generic Image Library Review - Begins October 5

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-11 12:39:54

"Stefan Seefeld" <seefeld_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:452CE07E.4070709_at_sympatico.ca...
> Andy Little wrote:
>
>>>> Nope Colour .. same concept.
>>> I strongly disagree. Modeling is always goal-driven. There is not only a
>>> single
>>> possible model to represent any given 'real-world' entity.
>>
>> One Concept can have many models. That is the reasoning behind a Concept.
>
> I'm not sure what the distinction between a Concept and a Model is...

Look up Generic programming for the answer to that.

> The point I was trying to make was that a physiologist, a physicist, a
> designer, etc., will all use different ways to think of 'Color', because
> what they try to represent in their respective models differs.

I think what each is doing with colour has many similarities. Quantifying,
filtering mixing etc. IOW there is a common set of operations that can be
applied to a colour.

> Abstracting away the goal from the discussion will take out all the life
> from the models and render them meaningless and useless.

OTOH spending time on the concept of Colour rather than a particular low level
representation may help the user to use work with colour more intuitively. One
could start from the most comprehensive model , which is probably that closest
to the physical phenomenon of electromagnetic radiation and then show how that
differs from a particular representation, and why there are various
representations. For instance the primary colours are red, yellow and blue. Why
is the computer representation comprised of red green and blue. Floating point
RGB colours often have a range of intensities per color between 0 and 1, yet if
I look at the sun I can burn my eyes. IOW what do those numbers actually
represent in terms of the physical phenomenon of light.

IOW surely  the goal is to try to model the physical phenomenon in the best
possible way given a set of constraints imposed by hardware and software.

regards
Andy Little