University links up with top broadcaster for new audio visual technology
Tuesday 5 July 2011
A new partnership between experts in audio and visual technologies at the University of Surrey and the BBC has been launched to develop the next wave of innovation in the field.
The Audio Research Partnership will develop new skills and the benefits of its research will be shared with industry to enable new products such as HD audio and Radio Player.
Professor Adrian Hilton, head of the University’s Visual Media Research Group, has collaborated with the Corporation on different projects over the past decade introducing novel technologies for both audio and visual projection.
For example, the iview project led by the Corporation introduced the first free-view point video system, for use in sports commentary, allowing the creation of novel views such as an event as seen by the referee or goal keeper.
He said: “The new Partnership will establish a strategic relationship for audio-visual research at Surrey. It is an exciting time and we hope that our collaboration will continue to flourish and provide significant benefits to those who use watch and listen to the broadcasts across a wide spectrum of programmes.”
Keith Robson, Director of Research and Enterprise Support at the University, said “We are delighted about this new partnership. The combination of our internationally recognised audio and signal processing research academics with the BBC’s world class creative and technical production talent is already producing a host of exiting new ideas which will bring new dimensions to broadcasts.”
BBC Research & Development will use the initiative to work in closer collaboration with leading universities in the field of audio-visual research and innovation. The new partnership demonstrates its growing commitment to increase its collaborative work with external partners from both academia and industry.
The primary academic partners will be the University of Surrey, including the university’s Institute of Sound Recording, for audio-visual research and the University of Salford for research into acoustics.
In addition the BBC’s R&D will also work very closely through collaborative partnerships with the universities of Southampton, Queen Mary University of London and York. All five partner universities are world-leaders in audio research. The Corporation is committed to supporting the Centre for at least five years.
Notes for Editors:
The initial research will include these areas:
Technical areas of focus:
• The audio centre will focus on four core areas of research initially
• Source separation (independent component analysis for audio un-mixing)
• Audio semantics (automated metadata generation)
• Spatial audio (including Ambisonics and Periphony)
• Room acoustics (including optimising rooms for spatial audio both at the broadcaster and consumer end)
• 3D audio-visual production
Pure research focus:
• Speech recognition (for applications including archives and accessibility)
• Audio coding (low latency and IP delivery)
The Visual Media Research Group (VMRG) at the University of Surrey is conducting research in video analysis, computer vision, graphics and animation which aims to provide enabling technologies for next generation communication and entertainment applications.
Research in CVSSP over the past decade has established an internationally recognised research activity at the cutting-edge of video-graphics convergence to enable new forms of visual media content production, interaction and analysis. VMRG has received a number of prestigious awards for both academic publications and products resulting from technology transfer with UK industry.
Media Enquiries
Howard Wheeler, Press Office at the University of Surrey, Tel: +44 (0)1483 686141, or Email mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk