Re: [Cbor] typed arrays for complex numbers

[Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 09:55:21 -0500, Gregory Allen wrote:
> Perhaps “complex” deserves a special tag because it’s so common,

My instinct is telling me that you are correct.

If someone ever comes up with a more generic way to store vectors in
arbitrary n-dimensional spaces, they can always say that complex numbers
should use this other tag.

> but it’s easy to see how a tag for each type of compound data doesn’t
> scale well.
> 
> Following Jeff’s line of reasoning could lead to something like structured
> data types in NumPy
> [https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.rec.html]. HDF5 supports
> similar constructs.
> 
> The idea is that one describes the type, and then an array can contain
> elements of the user-defined type. This can be used to describe blobs
> containing homogeneous arrays of arbitrary structures.
> 
> For example (from NumPy):
> 
>     cymk_type = [(‘c’, np.uint8), (‘y’, np.uint8), (‘m’, np.uint8), (‘k’, np.uint8)] # list of (name, type) pairs
>     x = np.zeros([640, 480], dtype=cymk_type)
> 
> I didn’t propose this before because it’s obviously much greater in scope
> than adding a “complex” tag. It’s not even clear to me what approach I
> would want to take to add this to CBOR.

Interesting.  I'd definitely want to leave this to someone who knows more
about this / actually cares about this :)  (That may be you, for all I
know!)

Jeff.

> 
> Thanks,
> -Greg
> 
> > On Jul 12, 2019, at 9:17 AM, Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 02:23:23 +0200, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> >> On Jul 12, 2019, at 01:24, Gregory Allen <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> I could imaging a “complex” tag, that’s a modifier for a dataType, so that one could do:
> >>> 
> >>>   multi-dim([dim, complex(ta-float32le(bstr)) ])
> >>> 
> >>> However, that doesn’t scale well to having several different compound types such as those mentioned above.
> >> 
> >> Well, it requires a new tag for each of these compound types, but if these are indeed different types, then tags are cheap (as long as they don’t have to come out of the 1+1 space :-).
> >> 
> >> So if this helps, we could indeed define tags (for complex, quaternion,
> >> octonions, sedenions, RGB, RGBA) that extract groups of 2, 4, 8, 16, 3, 4
> >> elements out of an array (tagged or classical CBOR).
> >> (Well, RGB is a bit weird, because there are so many color spaces.  Maybe
> >> just have tags for three- and four-dimensional color spaces.)
> > 
> > I'm far from a color expert, but as far as I know even for RGB color spaces
> > the values aren't always stored in one order.  At the very least there are
> > RGBA and ARGB.
> > 
> > Currently my best idea amounts to:
> > 
> > 	color(["RGB", [R1, G1, B1, R2, ...])
> > 	color(["RGBA", [R1, G1, B1, A1, R2, ...])
> > 	color(["CMYK", [C1, M1, Y1, K1, C2, ...])
> > 
> > I don't know if using a text string to identify the color component names
> > and order is an anti-pattern in CBOR but it is similar to the currency
> > related tags discussed some months ago.
> > 
> > This could even be extended to support planar formats (where the values for
> > each component are clumped together to allow better compression) and chroma
> > subsampling (where there aren't the same number of samples for each
> > component).  With either:
> > 
> > 	color(["RGB", [R1, R2, ...], [G1, G2, ...], [B1, B2, ...])
> > 	color(["YUV420", [Y1, Y2, ...], [U1, U2, ...], [V1, V2, ...])
> > 
> > or:
> > 
> > 	color(["RGB", [R1, R2, ..., G1, G2, ..., B1, B2, ...])
> > 	color(["YUV420", [Y1, Y2, ..., U1, U2, ..., V1, V2, ...])
> > 
> > I suppose the second would need to identify the number or ratio of values
> > for each component to support chroma subsampling, so the first would
> > probably be better.
> > 
> > Going down the rabbit hole of storing color data, there are also CCDs which
> > red/blue pixels.
> > 
> > 
> > Anyway, beware I know just enough about this to be dangerous :)  I'd
> > probably stay away from defining tags for colors until an actual expert
> > comes along.
> > 
> > Jeff.
> > 
> >> Alternatively, supplying the group size separately maybe can do all of these at omce, but then cannot distinguish quaternions from RGBA or CMYK.
> >> 
> >> Grüße, Carsten
> >> 
> >> _______________________________________________
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> > 
> > -- 
> > My public PGP key can be found at https://www.josefsipek.net/pgp/
> 



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