Alan Charmers, Professor at the University of Warwick to speak at the 'Future of TV' conference

Another speaker highlight at our conference on 'The Future of TV' will be Alan Charmers, Professor of Visualisation at WMG, University of Warwick, UK and formerly a Royal Society Industrial Fellow.

Alan has published over 245 papers and supervised 47 PhD students. Chalmers is founder and scientific adviser of the spinout company of trueDR Ltd. He has been active in UHD research and development for over 15 years and currently leads a team of 6 researchers investigating many aspects of the field, and especially HDR.

 

He is Honorary President of Afrigraph, a former Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH, and was a member of the Technical Advisory Board of Brightside, the HDR display pioneers. In addition, Chalmers was Chair of EU COST Action “IC1005 HDR” that co-ordinated HDR research across Europe to facilitate its widespread uptake and he is currently a UK representative on IST/37 considering the incorporation of HDR and WCG in MPEG.

At the conference he will be talking about  High Quality Compression for Displays of the Future

High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays offer the potential of showing images which are much richer in detail in the dark and bright areas of a scene compared to a traditional, Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) display. Current consumer HDR OLED displays have a peak luminance of approximately 700cd/m2 (or nits) while backlit LCD HDR displays currently have peak luminances of about 2,000nits.

 

Despite all the commercial interest in HDR, it is still not possible to fully appreciate the dynamic range when viewing HDR content on either of these types of display in normal ambient light conditions. Instead HDR content has to be viewed in a dark, and indeed preferably pitch-black room. This problem is exacerbated when viewing the content on mobile devices “on the go” and thus, potentially, in constantly changing ambient light conditions.

 

Brighter HDR displays are appearing. SIM2 showed a 10,000nit display at IBC2016, while Sony announced a 10,000nit display at CES2018. Mobile displays too are getting brighter with the Samsung Galaxy S8 having a peak luminance of over 1,000nits. Current HDR video compression methods, such as HDR10 and HLG have only been designed to minimise visual artefacts for displays of < 4,000nits and, furthermore, are not able to adapt to changing ambient lighting conditions.

 

In this talk he discusses the need for new approaches to HDR video compression which are efficient, able to cope with the brighter displays of the future, and can adapt not only to changing ambient lighting, but also to the mood of the content, to always ensure an enhanced viewing experience.