IBC Technical Papers highlight industry innovation

Technical Papers on subjects ranging from drones to sustainability are available to read at IBC365, including video presentations by some of the authors.

The Technical Papers are an important element of IBC, providing an opportunity for forward-thinking technologists and companies to unveil their ideas and research to media industry leaders hungry for new technology concepts, their possible uses and practical applications.

Entries came from sectors of the media, entertainment and technology industry, with all submissions rigorously reviewed by a panel of experts.

Dr Paul Entwistle, chair of IBC’s Technical Papers Committee, said the most popular topics this year included virtual and augmented reality, including 3D conferencing, 3D capture and the necessary delivery frameworks.

“We are also beginning to see how this technology can move from niche to mainstream as compelling experiences are blended with traditional television,” he said.

“Video compression, a cornerstone technology of our industry continues to improve and surprise. And the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning goes from strength to strength with papers spanning production assistance - including a synthetic news reader - to picture enhancement.”

Entwistle said one of the surprise topics this year was the subject of super-resolution, with the art of adding back lost detail a notable emerging theme.

“This year we received excellent technical papers illustrating the power of machine learning challenged with the task of up-converting a video’s resolution, dynamic range or aspect ratio. Also new this year is a set of very interesting papers on drones – spanning autonomous multi-drone planning and management tools through to large scale 3D scene capture.”

However, blockchain was a subject notable by the decline in papers on the nascent technology.

“Whilst we have a very interesting session on the importance of trust in news brand protection, overall we saw very few compelling papers using this technology compared to two years ago,” said Entwistle.

“Similarly 5G, this year we have one worthy detailed technical paper on enhancements to 5G broadcast and have in past years covered ‘what is 5G?’, exploratory use case trials and enabling technology frameworks, but overall we still wait to see papers demonstrating truly novel and compelling use cases enabled by 5G.”

Last year, the IBC2019 Best Conference Paper prize was scooped by Nokia Technologies and Innogiant for its research into real-time decoding and immersive augmented reality experiences for mobile devices.