Part II Projects 2010–2011
In 2010–2011, I co-supervised three final-year bachelor projects (with Andrew Lewis), which are known as Part II projects in Cambridge. This page briefly describes each project.
Streaming videos of solar imaging data (Ludwig Schmidt)
This project designed and implemented a client-server streaming architecture for visual inspection of the large amounts of data captured by modern solar observatories such as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Clients request a subset of the image database, and the server encodes the stream of images according to the H.264 standard on-the-fly in order to achieve a high compression ratio. The resulting bandwidth requirement is up to five times lower than a baseline of individually encoded JPEG images. Moreover, the server is able to encode a 1024 × 1024 pixel video stream in real-time at about 30 frames per second.
Converting anaglyph 3D to stereoscopic 3D (James Neve)
Stereoscopic 3D films are becoming increasingly popular, and the film studios are keen to release films in 3D. However, the lack of suitable home cinema equipment leads to some films being released in anaglyph versions. While these work with every DVD player and TV, they require special red-cyan or green-magenta glasses, which result in strong viewing discomfort. This project presents approaches to convert anaglyph 3D videos to stereoscopic 3D videos with full-colour left and right views, by using motion estimation and stereo matching techniques respectively.
GPU motion estimation for H.264 (unfinished)
This project implements motion estimation for H.264 in a stream processing language, so that it can run on a modern GPU. In most software H.264 encoders, the motion estimation is done entirely on the CPU, so shifting some of this load onto the GPU will improve the encoder: either by allowing it to run faster or do a better encode (or a trade-off between the two). The motion search algorithm needs to be chosen carefully to allow the massive parallelism that the GPU requires to run the code efficiently.