Speaker: Cliff Dive
Argon Design, based in Cambridge, UK, is an electronic product design consultancy working in a number of market areas, with a distinguished track record in multimedia, image and video processing. A combination of our video domain experience and electronics design skills has enabled us to conceive and realise a unique approach to live video stitching.
As a part of our internal R&D program over the last year we have been developing scalable technology for live video stitching on a hardware platform. Our ultimate goal is to create a semiconductor IP block for use in next generation cameras and smartphones featuring an array camera or 360° camera, performing video-rate, state-of-the-art, photographic quality, depth-compensated stitching of multiple camera inputs to create a composite output, but there are opportunities in the interim for ground-breaking hardware-based live streaming systems for a range of applications.
We are delighted to come to the IVRPA Conference 2016 and show you the first phase of this development, with a live demonstration of a hardware prototyping platform streaming real-time video from our 6-camera Freedom360 rig. This first step demonstrates the feasibility and promise of a hardware-based approach, enabling compact, powerful and energy-efficient systems for live streaming of panoramic video.
In our presentation we will start by recounting the R&D journey that led us to hardware based live video stitching, via projects investigating SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and stereo depth perception. We will then talk about our study of the stitching challenge, and the possible technical approaches – the challenge in real time is balancing image quality, processing power and physical demands of the application. We will describe where we are right now, the proposed road-map and the challenges ahead. We will of course be very pleased to hear and discuss the comments and ideas of the experts attending the conference.