[Interest] How to properly show progress for a signal processing pipeline

[william.crocker at analog.com]

>
> We have a data processing pipeline that looks like so:
>      Raw Data objects -> Type "A" data objects -> Type "B" data objects -> Final Data objects
>
> Each step can be considered a filtering process where the following mathematical relationship holds for the quantities of each type of object:
>      Raw count >= A count >= B count >= Final count
> Technically all of those quantity relationships can be >=, but in practice they almost never equal, the left hand side is almost always greater than right hand side, but it's technically possible that some could be equal with the right input data.
>
>   So the issue I'm having here is that I want to show the user some sort of progress indicator (this whole pipeline takes a bit of time), but at the start I only know the raw count, not any of the intermediate or final counts.

You can do what Microsoft does when copying files from one place to another, for 
example...
Take an unreasonable amount of additional time to study the problem
for the sole purposes of presenting an approximate progress bar.

:-)

Bill