Advanced Video Processing

BPRL has extensive experience of live real-time video effects, implemented in various ways (ASIC, FPGA, GPU, software, etc). These effects range from the basic fades and wipes through colour effects (e.g. colour correction), nonlinear 3D effects such as pageturn and ripple, to more complex effects involving physical simulations of real-world objects. Creation of these effects relies on the application of 3D vector geometry and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) principles, whilst maintaining the high picture quality required by the broadcast industry. For real-time performance, it is also frequently a challenge to create a suitably efficient implementation for the particular video format required.

Pictures are broadcast in a large and increasing number of formats, differing by the number of pictures sent per second, rows per picture, and pixels per row. In addition, the television industry has favoured interlaced pictures, whilst the computer and film industry have favoured progressive pictures. With the convergence of these industries, along with the explosion of High Definition, professional equipment must be able to cope with these various formats.

We have been involved in ‘format conversion’ for nearly 20 years, producing system and ASIC chip solutions to enable this diverse content to be scaled and processed to ensure the highest quality viewing experience. Our experience places us at the cutting edge, enabling us to influence the next generation of devices.

BPRL are constantly innovating in the field of computer vision in order to add unique features to all professional products, both hardware and software. The most advanced techniques for feature extraction, pattern recognition and motion analysis have been investigated and developed to work in real-world applications. Amongst computer vision technologies developed in BPRL are:

• moving object detection in outdoor scenes in the presence of spurious motion (e.g water, trees),
  
• fire and smoke detection,
  
• object segmentation using colour, texture and motion features and clustering techniques,
  
• people detection,
  
• lesion detection in medical images
• and camera motion analysis.