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Research at Kingston University into methods for tracking pedestrians and monitoring crowds using computer vision techniques has been translated into commercial products by Ipsotek Ltd and BAe Systems, resulting in economic benefits to these companies from sales of these products.
These products have been sold to high-profile customers including the London Eye, the O2 Arena and the Australian Government, providing significant commercial benefits, employment and growth for both companies, as well as providing an economic impact for these customers.
The explosive growth in the number of CCTV cameras has meant that analysing the volume of data produced has become almost unmanageable. Dublin based start-up Kinesense Ltd was incorporated in 2009 by Dr Mark Sugrue, who had carried out his PhD in Video Analytics at Royal Holloway. New methods to detect motion, track objects and classify behaviour in CCTV now enable the efficient scanning of video for important events. Kinesense Ltd has developed a range of forensic video analysis tools, which reduce the time required to search and analyse video footage by up to 95%. It has attracted investment funding of over €820,000, employs 7 full time staff and has made sales to police forces and security agencies in over 17 countries. Kinesense products benefit law enforcement professionals and organisations by providing more efficient surveillance and detection of criminal activity, allowing better use of investigator time, reducing the length of criminal investigations and increasing their success rate. The general public worldwide benefits from increased crime detection and the consequent prevention and reduction of criminal activity.
In the late 1990s, a significant barrier to the adoption of virtual reality software was the expense of manually creating models of real-world scenes. To address this, between 1998 and 2004, the ICARUS software system was developed, which enabled the creation of structured, 3D geometric models from a sequence of images or video. The system also pioneered improved methods of camera tracking. ICARUS was subsequently licensed and developed commercially, and became the foundation for video and film post-production products that are used worldwide in the film (e.g. Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures) and television (e.g. BBC) industries, underpinning a company with an annual turnover in excess of £1m.
The key impact of this project, in the form of `proof of concept', has been by influencing the practice of medical professionals (haematologists) at the Transfusion Medicine & Immunohematology section (in the hospital wing) of the Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore (India). This has been achieved by developing and implementing system software for segmenting (and watermarking) of the nuclei of the White Blood Cells (WBCs) of peripheral blood smear images to overcome the challenge of identifying various pathological conditions. Segmentation of medical images is a highly challenging process, especially when dealing with blood smear images, which are known to have a very complex cell structure. The project has led to a significant improvement in the work process of haematologists at CMC's hospital wing where the output of this research (software system pilot) is being used. This has had an impact on the way smear slides are digitised, archived, and includes the segmentation, analysis, and watermarking of medical images at CMC. Christian Medical College (CMC) and Hospital at Vellore is an educational and pioneering research institute and a tertiary care hospital (which is the CMC's hospital wing), located at Tamil Nadu in Southern India.
Our research on cross-layer optimised video distribution over wireless networks has led to wide- reaching economic and societal impact, via the following pathways:
- Standardisation: our research results were directly adopted in WirelessMAN and LTE, the two global standards for the next generation of wireless broadband networks.
- Collaborative research: the work resulted in a product that has been commercialised by our collaborators Rinicom Ltd, an SME specialising in mobile video, and recognised with a Queen's Award for Enterprise (2013), for achievements to which our research contributed significantly.
- User engagement: the work resulted in the deployment of a WiMAX network in Slavutych/Chernobyl, Ukraine; contributing to community regeneration in a UK Government programme to address social and economic consequences of nuclear power plant closure.
This study describes impact from James Ohene-Djan's research on personalisation, assistive technologies for the deaf, and web-based video. The research led to two spin-out companies:
(i) Viewtalk was started by Ohene-Djan in 2008 in partnership with Deafax, a charity dedicated to access for people with impaired hearing. Viewtalk developed video messaging specifically tailored to the needs of the UK's nine million deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
(ii) WinkBall was developed in partnership with a privately-owned UK news organisation (Correspondent Corporation). Winkball provided a system that enabled users to post video content for specific audiences and purposes. At its peak it employed 300 reporters to supply dedicated content, and generated a user community of 150,000 active content-generators and three million video watchers.
Motion blur is the effect that occurs when objects are filmed at speed. Researchers at Bournemouth University's (BU) National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) developed a new approach to more accurately model this effect in 3D image production. This produces aesthetically superior images without any penalty in rendering time. The technique was implemented by Pixar in their own films and in the commercial PRMan software they supply to other animation and effects studios in New Zealand, Canada, the USA and the UK, among others. As well as contributing significantly to Pixar's revenue, the technique improves the viewing experience and has been used on virtually every major feature film produced since 2008. This contributes to the global animation industry worth $207 US billion (2012, R1).
A new multi-purpose computer vision system to identify sub-standard food products has been created. The research developed a user-trainable software technology with a range of possible applications, thus overcoming the specificity and other limitations such as the high set-up cost of existing visual inspection systems. This research is achieving impact in several areas within the food industry, including quality analysis of fresh produce, food processing and food packaging. The technology is currently being trialled at the leading post-harvest applied research facility for agricultural storage in the UK, and is also being licensed to a world-leading supplier of food packaging machines and equipment for inclusion in a new product range under development. The longer-term impacts include safer food, reduced food waste, more efficient food production, and better use of natural resources (e.g. reduced use of water, pesticides and other inputs), through early detection of potentially harmful flaws in production and packaging.
Research on data compression produced novel algorithms that optimise the use of bandwidth and processing power. This research has led to the establishment of a product line that applies these algorithms to video surveillance software, marketed by Digital Barriers plc. Since 2008 this compression technology has allowed the company to grow from 8 to 41 staff and increase revenue from £800K to £6M in 2013. The novelty and usefulness of the data compression research was also appreciated by ThinkAnalytics plc. This led the company to the optimal design for data compression in their recommender system, which is currently being supplied to 130M cable TV customers making the product the most deployed content recommendation system in the market.
Research undertaken at UEA developed revolutionary algorithms for making pictures look better. These algorithms were subsequently engineered into prize winning desktop and embedded applications, resulting in the creation of the spinout company, Imsense Ltd., in 2006.
In July 2010, Imsense Ltd. was acquired by [text removed for publication] and the Imsense technology has now been incorporated into [text removed for publication] product pipeline.