Imaging laboratory products could self-diagnose video problems

Research being conducted into broadcast equipment for the television industry could lead to self-diagnosis of video problems in laboratory products with imaging capabilities.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) have been looking into issues such as aspect ratio correction, mono and stereo confusion in audio and frozen or blurred frames.

"Filmmakers can identify faults during production with an automatic fault identification and quality assessment system for video sequences," they report.

Their research could also lead to automated data filing in laboratory products of the future, as they are creating software to label meta data into video files without human intervention.

While the studies focus on genre and mood for entertainment broadcasts, the technology could be extended for use in a laboratory setting.

The IDMT progress is being exhibited at broadcast exposition IBC 2010 in Amsterdam, where the institute is also showing technology for real-time high-quality three-dimensional footage transmission.