Week 7 Bench: Measuring a reflection

Recovering readable text from a photograph of light bounced off something that was never meant to be a display

5 April 2027

Before the Bench#

No equipment to bring — the supplied photograph set does the capturing for you this week, so the session is about the reconstruction, not the shot.

In the Bench#

Working from a set of photographs of a monitor reflected in glasses, a teapot, and a plain wall, attempt to recover the displayed text from each, starting with the easiest surface. Note where recovery becomes a matter of computational sharpening and where it becomes physically impossible no matter how much processing is applied — a curved reflective surface and a diffuse matte one fail for different reasons, and the difference matters more than the failure itself.

Afterwards#

Keep your notes on which surface failed and why. This channel is the hardest of the seven to score on week 10’s rubric — the equipment is a camera and the defence is a floor plan — and an argument you can already make about why “hard to exploit” and “hard to defend” come apart here is worth more there than a number you cannot justify.