The 2011 Shortlist - Consumer Products

HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE ENABLED TELEVISION
Warwick University, Altera
The human eye and the visual cortex of the brain is still the most advanced imaging system we know of, able to deal with light variances of 10,000-fold within a single scene and adapt automatically without any conscious effort.

A project by Warwick University and Altera aims to replicate aspects of this, with what is claimed to be the world’s first true High Dynamic Range (HDR) video-capture and display prototype system.

Normal – or Low Dynamic Range – digital video and imaging can only capture a limited range of tones, necessitating a tradeoff: if the details in the darker, shadowed areas are preserved, then highlights such as the sky will tend to be burnt out.

The project’s HDR system allows the display of dynamic HDR images, covering 20 f-stops, at full high-definition resolution (1,920 × 1,080), at 30 frames per second [CBBD*09].

However, the amount of data generated when capturing this is huge – approximately 42Gbytes of data a minute (compared with only 9Gbytes for traditional video) or a CD of data per second. Thus, novel compression technology was developed that enables HDR video to be compressed with minimum loss of perceptual quality, transmitted along existing ICT infrastructure and then decompressed and viewed as HDR footage.