When making
digital data recordings using some form of computer or
calculator, data is input in a variety of ways and stored on some form of electronic medium. During this process calculations and transformations are performed on the data to optimize it for storage. This invention involves designing the calculations in such a way that they include what is needed for each of many different processes, such as
data compression,
activity detection and object recognition. As the incoming data is subjected to these calculations and stored, information about each of the processes is extracted at the same time. Calculations for the different processes can be executed either serially on a single processor, or in parallel on multiple distributed processors. We refer to the extraction process as “synoptic
decomposition”, and to the extracted information as “synoptic data”. The term “synoptic data” does not normally include the main body of
original data. The synoptic data is created without any prior bias to specific interrogations that may be made, so it is unnecessary to input search criteria prior to making the recording. Nor does it depend upon the nature of the algorithms / calculations used to make the synoptic
decomposition. The resulting data, comprising the (processed)
original data together with the (processed) synoptic data, is then stored in a
relational database. Alternatively, synoptic data of a simple form can be stored as part of the main data. After the recording is made, the synoptic data can be analyzed without the need to examine the main body of data. This analysis can be done very quickly because the bulk of the necessary calculations have already been done at the time of the original recording. Analyzing the synoptic data provides markers that can be used to access the relevant data from the main
data recording if required. The nett effect of doing an analysis in this way is that a large amount of recorded
digital data, that might take days or weeks to analyze by conventional means, can be analyzed in seconds or minutes. This invention also relates to a process for generating continuous parameterised families of wavelets. Many of the wavelets can be expressed exactly within 8-bit or 16-bit representations. This invention also relates to processes for using adaptive wavelets to extract information that is robust to variations in ambient conditions, and for performing
data compression using locally adaptive quantisation and
thresholding schemes, and for performing post recording analysis.