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Welcome to the 2000 edition of my research webpages. The The 2004 edition is probably what you're looking for, but I'm leaving these pages here because they include material on older projects.

I am part of the Visual Systems Laboratory in the Media Engineering Research Group at the University of York. I study visual media such as still images, rendered graphics and video, in applications from production, video-telephony and surveillance to wearable computers and augmented environments. I apply the technologies of image processing and computer vision to represent, analyse and code these media, usually seeking fast, adaptive methods.

For example:

• I am the inventor of Binary Tree Predictive Coding for general-purpose still image compression. Version 5 of BTPC was released in March 2003. Source code and makefile for Unix/Linux is available here, or, with Windows executables, here.
• I have developed a system for real-time image mosaicing.
  • Here's a webcam video of my office,
  • and here's the real-time mosaic constructed from it.
  • A real-time mosaic of our back garden,
  • and one of a poster of Michael Faraday that shows you can wave a camera around however you like in front of a plane, and still make a mosaic.
• I am doing research with John Mateer on automated shot analysis. We have a program called ASAP that tries to analyse shots in a way that is useful for people in the production industry.
  • Here's an automatically generated log for footage from a music video John directed, called Stargazer.
  • An automatically generated match dissolve for Stargazer created by giving our program the first and third shots in this sequence and asking it to find the best shot to put between them to bridge the movement.
  • Here's an automatically generated log for the first 20 minutes of the Steve McQueen film Le Mans, which we use to assess logging accuracy because it has both very short shots (e.g. Shots 250-255) and fast foreground motion (e.g. in Shot 85).
• Shaun O'Mahony did his MEng project with me on artificial life in a video-augmented environment. We call the environment SketchTop -- it's an augmented whiteboard mounted horizontally, so you can write and erase easily, but also rest other augmented objects on it. The application is called PenPets.
  • Here's Shaun's video of PenPets' basic maze solving ability.
  • You can interact with PenPets by writing, erasing and with objects.
  • Here's what happens when you have multiple users (players) and multiple PenPets.

To the left are links to more information about recent and present research. Please explore, and if you need more information, send an email to jar11@ohm.york.ac.uk.