Knowing when it’s a bin job

In Britain, when they say something’s a “bin job” they mean it’s fit only for the bin, or trash, to use the American word. Thus “binning” means you’re throwing something in the trash.

In machine vision “binning” has an entirely different meaning. “Binning” in this context means adding together the charges from adjacent pixels. Thus a 2x2 bin means adding pixels pairs both horizontally and vertically. In the case of a 640 x 480 image, it becomes 320 x 240.

Now since we usually want more pixels rather than fewer, you might wonder why anyone would want to bin. Well, writing on the Adimec blog, Gretchen Alper has an explanation for you.

It all gets a bit technical, so I’m going to jump over the details and skip to the part where I say, “check out the Adimec blog. It’s really good.”