typed op• Data kinds: signal → signal
• Call: fullseye.apply(img, "tb_companding_mu_law", a=0.5, b=0.5) (the 2-D model is one image plus two scalar knobs a,b∈[0,1])
*The figure is the actual output on a synthetic 128×128 input. Left: input, right: output. Point clouds are drawn as a top-down scatter (brightness = z), 1-D series as a line plot, volumes as the maximum-intensity projection along z, videos as the middle frame, complex images as magnitude; return values that are not pictures are shown as the values themselves.*
Sweeping knob a (0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9, the other knob at its default):
▸ tb_companding_mu_law: knob a sweep (docs site)
Sweeping knob b (0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9, the other knob at its default):
▸ tb_companding_mu_law: knob b sweep (docs site)
Stages (the ops that come before → this op, left to right):
▸ tb_companding_mu_law: stages (docs site)
On other images (synthetic scene / photo / coins. Top row: inputs, bottom row: their outputs. Knobs at default):
▸ tb_companding_mu_law: other inputs (docs site)
mu-law companding — the G.711 curve, used here on any 1-D signal.
Compress with `F(v) = sign(v) * ln(1 + mu|v|) / ln(1 + mu)` on the signal
scaled to `[-1, 1]`, quantise uniformly, expand back. The steps end up fine
near zero and coarse near full scale, which is the right allocation when the
interesting part of the signal is small compared with its peaks — speech,
vibration, anything with a large crest factor.
This is where mu-law comes from: the image operator
`companding_mu_law` is the same curve applied to intensity. Reporting both
keeps the family honest about which dimension the technique was designed for.
Applicability — it is the crest factor that decides. Measured on a sine
of amplitude *A* with one sample pinned at full scale, so the crest factor is
exactly `1/A` (mean square error relative to a uniform quantiser):
crest 50 4 bit 0.011 6 bit 0.014 (about 90x better)
crest 20 4 bit 0.122 6 bit 0.101
crest 6.7 4 bit 0.613 6 bit 0.616
crest 2.0 4 bit 4.22 6 bit 6.03 (several times WORSE)
So the rule is crest factor above roughly 7 — speech, vibration, impact.
Below that, a plain uniform quantiser wins and mu-law actively hurts.
★Note the peak is a single sample: on random signals of the same family
the advantage swung between 0.55 and 0.87 purely with the seed, because the
largest excursion sets the scale. Measure the crest factor of *your* signal,
do not assume it from the distribution.
Other limits: `mu` near 0 degenerates to uniform quantisation (that is how
you check the curve is doing anything), and the curve is fixed — unlike a
Lloyd-Max codebook fitted to the signal — which is the point when values must
stay comparable across recordings.
Typed bridge of the 1d op `companding_mu_law into the 2-D evolution registry: the same implementation, called under the op(v, a, b) convention. a drives mu (default 255) and b drives bits` (default 8).
• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).
• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.
The program below has been verified to run (same input as the figure). In Studio's help this block becomes buttons that load and run it on the spot.
img_to_signal 0.50 0.50 tb_companding_mu_law 0.50 0.50
▸ Load this pipeline · Load & run
The examples below call the underlying ledger op companding_mu_law. This bridge op is the same implementation adapted to the fn(v, a, b) convention, so the behaviour carries over unchanged (only the call form differs).
• gallery2d_gray_arith — py -3.11 examples/gallery2d_gray_arith.py
signal as input)identity · tb_create_funct_1d_array · tb_smooth_funct_1d_gauss · tb_smooth_funct_1d_mean · tb_derivate_funct_1d · tb_integrate_funct_1d · tb_zero_crossings_funct_1d · tb_abs_funct_1d
typed)tb_points_to_voxel · tb_estimate_point_normals · tb_iss_keypoints · tb_project_points · tb_render_point_depth · tb_statistical_outlier_removal · tb_radius_outlier_removal · tb_voxel_grid_downsample
*Provenance: ops.py — 2D operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*
© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.