Digital Media Group

Overview

This group carries out research in the creation, capture, processing, compression and communication of images and sound. Its research activities are concentrated in the following areas: computer vision and image processing, graphics, and animation and virtual reality. More recently, the group has begun to develop close links with the extensive network of media production companies in the Bristol area with a view to conducting inter-disciplinary research in digital media technology and creative media content production. This work forms part of the Creative Media Technology Initiative in which the group is a major contributor. Research in this area focuses on the merging of video, graphics and animation technology, particularly in relation to the development of novel techniques for generating 3-D content.

Achievements

• An EPSRC project has led to the development of a new image segmentation method based on colour and texture which will form the basis of a number of new projects.
• A vision system, funded by a medical charity, to recognise brain tumours in MR images is identifying tumours with less than 1% false positives. Ongoing funding has been approved.
• An EPSRC funded project in collaboration with Warwick University has developed an advanced model-based video codec.
• A database of 350 natural outdoor scenes have been carefully segmented and hand labelled to provide a ground truth for research into object recognition. This is a collaboration with British Aerospace who plan to make the database available to other researchers in the field.
• INSITE, a joint international project supported by the British Council, has developed an archaeological visualisation tool. This system has been used to reconstruct several archaeological sites, and annual dayschools have been organised in this area.
• An EPSRC project on the Dynamics of Deformable Bodies has produced a theory and implementation to animate deformable bodies.
• The Scope Rendering System supports photorealistic image generation and includes dynamic discontinuity meshing for radiosity rendering.

Group Links

• Computer Vision
• Graphics

Projects

• Real-Time Camera Tracking.
• AUTOARC: Automated Film Analysis for Indexing, Archiving and Editing.
• Motion Analysis and Tracking.
• Interactive Searching of Image Databases.
• Video Data Compression.
• Photo-Realistic Visualisation of Archaeological Sites.
• The Creation of 3D Models from a Set of Images.
• Medical Image Processing.
• An Automated Vision Based Flaw Detection System for Vehicle Inspection.
• Seamlessly Integrated Distributed Shared Virtual Environments.
• Pre Visualisation for Production Planning and Automated Motion Camera Control.
• Locating Text in Indoor Scenes.

Staff

Andrew Calway	Neill Campbell	Nishan Canagarajah	Kirsten Cater	Colin Dalton
Walterio Mayol-Cuevas	Christopher Melhuish	Majid Mirmehdi	Erik Reinhard	Veronica Sundstedt

Research Staff

Tilo Burghardt	Dima Damen	Ponciano Escamilla-Ambrosio	Andrew Gee	David Gibson
Sion Hannuna	Olga Rajadell

Research Students

Thomas Banwell	John Bartholomew	Daniel Blueman	Anthony Buck	Pished Bunnun
Jessica Cauchard	Denis Chekhlov	David Coulthurst	Ben Daubney	Shahbe Desa
Mosalam Ebrahimi	Siyuan Fang	Anthony Glynn	Osian Haines	Timo Kunkel
Benjamin Long	Jose Martinez Carranza	John McGonigle	Irwandi Mohamad Hipiny	Adeline Paiement
Foteini Pouli	Richard Sherley	Sudeep Sundaram	Xiaosong Wang	Xiaohui Yang
Ronghua Yang

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