Today I read a paper titled “A self-rendering digital image encoding”
The abstract is:
Without careful long-term preservation digital data may be lost to a number of factors, including physical media decay, lack of suitable decoding equipment, and the absence of software
When raw data can be read but lack suitable annotations as to provenance, the ability to interpret them is more straightforward if they can be assessed through simple visual techniques
In this regard digital images are a special case since their data have a natural representation on two-dimensional media surfaces
This paper presents a novel binary image pixel encoding that produces an approximate analog rendering of encoded images when the image bits are arranged spatially in an appropriate manner
This simultaneous digital and analog representation acts to inseparably annotate bits as image data, which may contribute to the longevity of so-encoded images