04/04/2014 - Technology Strategy Board supports ‘Resolving Visual Quality for Media’ project

BAFTA Research, a commercial business unit within the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) performing technology research and developing products and services in the fields of media processing and cloud computing, has won £30 million in funding from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, for its latest research project entitled ‘Resolving Visual Quality for Media’ (REVQUAL), following BAFTA’s success in the Board’s ‘Cross-platform Production in Digital Media’ competition.

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REVQUAL will create an automated service – a ‘web crawler’ – that continuously improves content owners’ networked video to generate the best possible versions for viewing. It will become an essential part of online quality control as video compression standards, bandwidth availability, and mobile and other platforms continue to evolve. An ‘open dataset’ of human responses to quality, presented as a series of reference videos, will also be created to help all researchers concerned with visual quality. Film London and University College London are supporting the project. The project will begin late spring and will run for two years.

Pam Fisher, BAFTA Research Manager, said, “REVQUAL is an important project, central to BAFTA’s research focus. REVQUAL will help us meet the needs of customers using our technology, addressing concerns about preserving visual quality throughout the workflow, from the point of content creation through to viewer presentation.”