The COGNITUS project produced technological results beyond the state-of-the-art through the final unified solution, and the individual technological components which leverage artificial intelligence based algorithms for media enhancements. Technical innovations have been recognised on a European level through https://www.innoradar.eu. Innovations centred around: UGC and production convergence; quality of experience, UHD broadcasting and HDR, content enhancement, reward schemes for media content crowdsourcing in the creative industries, data compression and data coding, and creation of an immersive sound experience from the audio content of UGCs.
Key innovative features of the COGNITUS platform include quality assessment for quality control and enhancement of the UGC for creating high quality UHD experiences. Features include spatial upscaling, framerate up-conversion, and dynamic range adaptation as visual enhancement mechanisms. Refinement modules, such as video stabilisation and portrait-to-landscape modules are also offered. Semantic enrichment of the metadata is achieved deep-learning algorithms which associate media annotations with respective visual and text data. Various audio enhancement tools handle a number of distortions that can occur in UGC such as wind noise or clipping, as well as audio synchronisation for alignment of overlapping audio and video streams
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COGNITUS offers an advanced, fast and efficient video delivery system, capable of supporting new video formats (such as UHD, HDR and High Frame Rates (HFR)). An HTTP adaptive streaming paradigm, and capable of efficiently compressing using an open source HEVC encoder is supported.
The various content processing algorithms at the heart of the technical innovations and associated results are available to the scientific community as research publications, and open access datasets. See our publications page for a list. The new technology introduced is also now available to the consortium partners, and beyond with some software results also available as open source. COGNITUS UGC tools can be used for research purposes by various institutions in the future.
COGNITUS contributes to social innovation by providing tools that aim to increase productivity in specific aspects of media industry. The media industry is often considered as one of most rapidly growing, leading to increased employment of younger generations, which is not typical for all sectors. Most importantly, the COGNITUS concept in which all people can become content creators (and producers have access to tools to create new programmes) has potential to enable new creative services, processes and experiences.
Solutions
COGNITUS project was realized into a robust platform and suite of applications. COGNITUS now offers an end-to-end platform to aggregate User Generated Content (UGC) during events, enhance to Ultra-High Definition (UHD) quality and provide semantic enrichment to facilitate the smooth integration in broadcast productions. COGNITUS includes innovative tools for the producers to manage calls for UGC contributions and access the enhanced content using a number of smart search methods, including via text, visual similarities and audio correlation. A suite of applications integrating innovative technological modules provide the overall functionality: a mobile app for UGC contributors; plot authoring for producers; a set top box and companion app for end-users; and a system administration.
See our Products and Technologies for final products.