Standards Committee

Scientific Data & Standards

Standards Committee

The Standards Committee has prepared a specification document that provides an in-depth review of the motivation, goals, and underlying considerations of a Hyper-dimensional Spectral File Format.

MSA Policy on Digital Imaging

The MSA position on digital image processing has been approved as follows:

"Ethical digital imaging requires that the original uncompressed image file be stored on archival media (e.g., CD-R)without any image manipulation or processing operation. All parameters of the production and acquisition of this file,as well as any subsequent processing steps, must be documented and reported to ensure reproducibility.

Generally, acceptable (non-reportable) imaging operations include gamma correction, histogram stretching, andbrightness and contrast adjustments. All other operations (such as Unsharp-Masking, Gaussian Blur, etc.) must bedirectly identified by the author as part of the experimental methodology. However, for diffraction data or any otherimage data that is used for subsequent quantification, all imaging operations must be reported."

This policy was formulated by the Digital Image Processing & Ethics Group of the MSA Education Committee and was adopted as MSA policy at the Summer Council meeting August 2-3, 2003.