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After introducing the Airy pattern in The Perfect Camera, I will show in this article how the PSF of a pinhole camera looks. A camera with a classical lens focuses the image that would be at infinity on the detector, which means that you actually get (approximately) the Airy pattern as the image of a point source there. This is not true for a pinhole camera, so… read more

The perfect camera is diffraction limited. This article is written strictly from an optical point of view, so don’t expect a Nikon / Canon / Leica comparison here… Optically, a camera (or telescope or other optical instrument) can be described by its point spread function (PSF), which… read more

The impulse response of a system is, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, the response of a system to an impulse. This article introduces this all important concept, and shows how knowing only the impulse response of an LTI system can be used to… read more

The title of this article is Discrete-Time Signal Processing, although the term digital signal processing (with the abbreviation DSP) is much more common. Both types of signals are discrete in the time dimension, in the sense that they are sequences of numbers. The difference is that a digital signal is… read more

Responsive design is a way to make websites work both on desktops, tablets, and smartphones, without having to create a separate site for each of them. Something had to happen with my site to make it more mobile-friendly, and I’ve decided to “go responsive” with this site for several reasons: The percentage of mobile visitors is increasing steadily, so… read more

The term “exponential growth” strongly implies quick growth. However, something that grows exponentially will seem to grow quite slowly at first. In practice, there is a good chance that you won’t notice it at all until it suddenly “pops into view”. Take the adoption of… read more

I’d like to kick off a series of articles on signal processing with the answer to a very practical question: How to find out how a lion sounds in a concert hall. I’ll deal with more theoretical subjects in later articles. Smuggling an actual lion unseen into a concert hall seems unlikely to succeed, and might… read more

It turns out that the balls in two popular sports, basketball and tennis, are almost exactly the right size for an Earth-Moon system scale model. Take a standard NBA basketball, which has a circumference of 29.5 in (74.9 cm). The diameter of the basketball is then 9.39 in (23.85 cm). If we let this ball represent the Earth… read more

The illustration shows the Earth-Moon system to scale, with the same scale used for size and distance. The diameter of the Earth is 12742 km, while the diameter of the Moon is 3475 km. So, to draw the Earth-Moon system to scale on a screen, each… read more