[tjradcliffe]

This is the traditional model of academic publishing that was driven by the limited communication and collaboration ability of the time. A study like the one you describe would be done by multiple co-authors (I don't think I've written an image processing paper that doesn't have at least three people as authors, all of whom actually contributed to the work one way or another.)

Furthermore, the traditional paper would have to make a lot of guesses about the kinds of images people were likely interested in and the range of characteristics that mattered. What kind of noise spectrum due your images have, how does increasing contrast affect things, what about the spacial frequency distribution in the images themselves, and so on... Different fields have radically different "typical" images and the attempts at covering a reasonable range of the in traditional papers were not necessarily very limited.

Instead, I see this model of publication as exploiting the possibilities of the 'Net to allow more effective communication and collaboration. And it is publication: it is making public, which is what makes the difference between science and alchemy... if there had been a "Proceedings of the Alchemical Society" we'd have had chemistry a thousand years ago.

What this model of publication does not (yet) have is a reputation mechanism, but it isn't clear it needs one, because you can see the results (and the code) for yourself. As such, I think the author has not only done something interesting in the image compression space, they are pointing the way on the future of scientific publication.

Measuring this model as if it could be described as a certain amount of progress along a line toward the old endpoint is mistaken. This is a paradigm shift, and the models are incommensurable.

[pezzep]

> What this model of publication does not (yet) have is a reputation mechanism, but it isn't clear it needs one, because you can see the results (and the code) for yourself. As such, I think the author has not only done something interesting in the image compression space, they are pointing the way on the future of scientific publication.

The original post is certainly interesting, but that doesn't mean it extends our knowledge of image processing. For example, see this 20 year old paper that proposes the idea:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./garland/scape/scape.pdf

This is something peer review would pick up on... That said, I don't mean to discourage the author. It's a great idea and nicely presented!

[mc808]

Maybe OP or someone else will take the initiative to add that and other reference material to the project's wiki.

[bastijn]

I think there has been a misunderstanding. I never meant to say there is no place for the work of the author. I merely wanted to say that saying academic work produces nothing, as the reaction I replied to stated, is shortsighted.

I completely agree with the rest of your comment. Depending on audience you might prefer the one approach over the other. A person searching for an algorithm to use in a (large) production environment will most likely search for traditional publications (as you called it), while research might search for the other type described.

That leaves a discussion if you can talk of academic publications missing all the contents required for a publication. ;). I would like to call that academic work, and the other academic publications.