What worries me is that COTS photo equipment increasingly comes with these algorithmic retouches that "over-represent" the data - or, put another way, bake its own interpretation into image, in a way that cannot be distinguished from source data.
It's nice for a casual Instagrammer, but then a lot of science and engineering also gets done using COTS equipment. I worry that at some point, a lot of money will be burned, a lot of time wasted, or even lives lost, because someone didn't notice they've based the conclusions of their scientific experiment/engineering analysis on such "computer best guesses". As a researcher, you'll see a weird pattern on some of the photos and will be left wondering, is that a real phenomenon, or is it just one of the black box, trade secret neural networks in the camera choking on input data it wasn't trained for?
A compression algorithm knows which data was lost and can optimize the discarded data for a good lost data/saved space ratio. Data "lost" by a low resolution sensor most definitely does not fit this description. Imagine saving a FullHD png instead of a 4k jpg - the former is most likely far worse.
It's not too dissimilar, I agree, but there are differences.
I did a web search for "cots" and learned that a cot is...
> a small usually collapsible bed often of fabric stretched on a frame
But in this case, COTS is apparently...
> commercial, off-the-shelf
In other words "photo equipment" or "consumer/retail photo equipment."
Upon further reading[0] it seems odd to use the term here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something. It's often used for software and has a key phrase...
> packaged solutions which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization
But it's possible the term has been co-opted to mean something else now.
I use it in a way it's used in disciplines that also work with specialty-built, or even custom-built equipment. Such as science, military and some types of engineering (e.g. aerospace). The first sentence of the linked article describes it:
"Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf[1] (COTS) products are packaged solutions[buzzword] which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of custom-made, or bespoke, solutions."
So for example, a research team may decide to not spend money on expensive scientific cameras for monitoring experiment, and instead opt to buy an expensive - but still much cheaper - DSLR sold to photographers, or strap a couple of iPhones 15 they found in the drawer (it's the future, they're all using iPhones 17, which is two generations behind the newest one). That's using COTS equipment. COTS is typically sold to less sophisticated users, but is often useful for less sophisticated needs of more sophisticated users too. But if COTS cameras start to accrue built-in algorithms that literally fake data, it may be a while before such researchers realize they're looking at photos where most of the pixels don't correspond to observable reality, in a complicated way they didn't expect.
In the novel, quantum computers (rather than ML per-se) are tasked with interpolating more and more detailed data from astronomical observations, to the point that tracking individual members of an alien species on a distant world, underground, is possible. Eventually it is noticed that cutting off the astronomical data entirely doesn't interrupt the interpolated data. Then things get weird.
I won't go into further plot details, as that would be spoilery, but it is a pretty good book, reminiscent to me of Greg Egan's oeuvre (the novel is actually by Robert Charles Wilson).
It’s a common acronym in the tech world. I’ve usually used it in the context of a “buy-or-build” conversation about software (e.g. “most businesses are best off using COTS applications than doing custom development” - that sort of thing). But the acronym means what it means, so when OP talks about COTS camera gear, it makes sense to me.
As an aside, the term of art is "make-or-buy" if you want to be able to Google it.
The discussion we are having is interesting because COTS are notorious for their hidden costs and how difficult they are to properly budget. Having to find a way to disable or reverse advance post-processing in a camera would be a fairly typical example of that. In this specific case it might mean having to commission a custom firmware from the camera manufacturer - something which is very much doable but might end up costing you as much as buying bespoke equipments for inferior results in the end.
Interesting, in software world I’ve always heard/used build/buy rather than make/buy, and I’m guessing that comes from construction industry as a lot of traditional software PM methodology was inspired by that world. If you Google ‘build vs buy’[0] (no quotes) all your top results are software discussions. If you Google ‘build or buy’, it’s all about housing. [1]
Make-or-buy seems more a term for manufacturing industry/SCM. TIL
I did the same web search (although in all caps) and was immediately pointed to “Commercial of-the-shelf”, and I redid it now in incognito mode over a VPN, and the first answer is still “ Commercial-off-the-shelf” (with an added hyphen probably due to the language where the VPN endpoint is located.)
>It's nice for a casual Instagrammer, but then a lot of science and engineering also gets done using COTS equipment. I worry that at some point, a lot of money will be burned, a lot of time wasted, or even lives lost, because someone didn't notice they've based the conclusions of their scientific experiment/engineering analysis on such "computer best guesses".
Most research papers are crap anyway, in a much more fundamental way and for much worse reasons/bad incentives with far more impact than "computational imaging".
This is probably the last thing I'd worry about when thinking about "millions/time/wasted" for some research.
It's nice for a casual Instagrammer, but then a lot of science and engineering also gets done using COTS equipment. I worry that at some point, a lot of money will be burned, a lot of time wasted, or even lives lost, because someone didn't notice they've based the conclusions of their scientific experiment/engineering analysis on such "computer best guesses". As a researcher, you'll see a weird pattern on some of the photos and will be left wondering, is that a real phenomenon, or is it just one of the black box, trade secret neural networks in the camera choking on input data it wasn't trained for?