Pendell

I was looking at deinterlacing filters and saw the term "laplacian" come up again. I wondered to myself, "what does that mean anyway, and how does it relate to video processing?"

So I said, "wikipedia, explain what laplacian means" and upon reading the first paragraph felt like I'd been drag-and-dropped into the middle of the Pacific ocean, left to fend for myself. This sounds more like Star Trek technobabble than Star Trek technobabble. This reads like the exaggerated parody of Star Trek technobabble. I lowkey love it. It's like peeking into a Pandora's box of a whole other side of human interest and then gently closing the lid again going "I'm not going down that rabbit hole."

Pendell @pendell5/19/2023, 7:04 AM

Wikipedia said when referring to video and image processing, "laplacian" usually refers to "The Laplacian of Gaussian"

wasn't that one of the spears in Evangelion or something.

brb gotta convolve my Gaussian so it doesn't turn into a dark blob. Gotta avoid those dark blobs, y'know. That's why I never go out without my multi-scale blob detector with automatic scale selection. Thank god for that scale-normalized Laplacian operator or I don't know how we'd all still be alive.

I just wanted to learn more about deinterlacing.

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in reply to @pendell's post:

noah @mahalis5/19/2023, 8:50 PM

are you still looking for a better explanation of the Laplacian? I had to learn about it for a project a while back

Pendell @pendell5/20/2023, 12:32 AM

I was only really curious to know what it meant in the context of video processing and deinterlacing filters, there are some filters that would describe their function like "uses laplacian edge detection" and I'm totally clueless as to what that means or how it's better than some alternative method of edge detection.

in reply to @pendell's post:

John Colagioia @jcolag5/19/2023, 11:31 AM

I know what that gibberish means, because I took multidimensional calculus and differential equations classes in college (short version, it squashes the big matrix explaining the multidimensional rate of change into something much simpler), but I should point out that it's a bad sign when you check Simple English Wikipedia (change the "en" at the start of the URL to "simple"), and it mostly just says "nope, that first article was fine."

That has always been my objection to technobabble in science-fiction, too. It always comes off as "let me show you how my education makes me better than you," rather than "let me help you save our lives"...

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