Anti-piracy technology to study cinemagoers

Aralia Systems, a specialist security company, is working with machine vision experts from the University of the West of England (UWE) to redevelop imaging technology currently used for detecting criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras.

Aralia Systems has been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with UWE’s Machine Vision Lab (MVL) worth in excess of £215,000 to target the technology for market research data collection techniques.

The project is supported by a grant of £118,000 from the Technology Strategy Board and the EPSRC.

The team will build instruments capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to adverts and films. They will also be looking to gather data about attention and audience movement.

According to Prof Melvyn Smith, director of the MVL, the team will combine 2D high resolution camera technology from Aralia Systems with 3D imaging techniques developed by UWE.

Smith explained the 3D imaging is based on a technique called photometric stereo, which was developed as part of a face recognition project at UWE. The technique works by taking three images from the same location but under different lighting conditions.