The Aurora Project to be demonstrated in Lisbon

INA,BBC and RTP invite the FIAT/IFTA members visiting Expo'98 in Lisbon between July 13th and August 14th, to spend some time visiting the demonstration that will be made of the first achievements of the Aurora project. This demonstration will be situated on the 10th floor of the Portuguese Telecom Tower, just in front of the West exhibition entrance, outside the Expo area. Admission is free. In addition to the demonstrations of the results of other European ACTS Programme multimedia projects, they will be able to enjoy the splendid view over the whole Expo area, and the Tejo Bay.

The AURORA project aims to create tools for efficiently restoring Television archives. Present methods need extensive manpower. The Aurora project already produced hardware which will allow a large proportion of defects to be removed automatically so that manual operation is only required for a small proportion of the processed programme, and developed advanced user interfaces to assist the operator in correcting easily and efficiently the remaining defects.

The ambitious nature of the project required significant advances to be made in the field of real-time processing algorithms. Research was conducted to this effect in a partnership made up of the Universities of Cambridge, Delft and Tampere, as well as the BBC R&D and INA Research Department. Snell & Wilcox, a well-known manufacturer in the field of high-quality video equipment, developed the real-time video processing system. INA handled the software development and SGT the system integration. INA, the BBC and RTP, which hold and exploit among the biggest television archive collections in Europe, will do life-size testing and validation of the system on Television archive documents, some of which cannot be exploited by using other methods.

During three years, the project has successfully :

• Analysed film and video archive material to identify the nature, frequency and relative severity of impairments.
• Developed and tested algorithms which offer more effective solutions for the removal or suppression of impairments in the video domain.
• Developed hardware prototype equipment to implement the algorithms and techniques to provide for the continuous automatic removal of artefacts complying with an outline system specification.
• Designed and implemented a system capable of performing interactive archive restoration in real-time, combined with the versatility of software control and processing when needed.

The system processes in real time :

• Video noise, film grain and other random continuous defects,
• Impulsive and erratic impairments (video drop-outs, film dirt, sparkle etc.),
• Unsteadiness,
• Flicker,
• Film scratches,
• Continuous linear defects (streaking, echoes, loss of detail etc.).

However, the final decision may always be taken by the operator who may, at any moment, decide to change a parameter, an action, at a specific time-code or position, to manually point out a zone to be corrected, or even at times to modify the editing of the programme.

Advanced software tools were developed for this purpose, enabling the trained operator to obtain a good quality image in a minimum amount of time, by optimised use of the real-time processing resources.

The FIAT members should be greatly interested in the tools developed by the Aurora project, since these tools are expected to help dramatically reducing the costs involved in restoring Television programmes, and help giving a new life to programmes that could not otherwise reach today's quality standards.

Jean-Hugues Chenot
Institut National de l'Audiovisuel