Use of morphological filters in detection of flashes and other light events

Abstract

In a collaboration agreement between the UPC and the Thomson Corporate Research Lab, represented by Joan Llach, the objective of this project is to detect local and global flash light events of different intensities in video sequences. Thomson has shown interest in using this kind of information to enable the application of techniques that exploit the characteristics of such events, thus expecting to improve the overall encoding efficiency. This study presents a broad definition for flash light events , and proposes the design and implementation of a flash detector in two steps; a first step of rough detection that uses morphologic filters in both spatial and temporal domains, and a second processing step that offers a much more refined result. In the first stage of the project the objectives were defined and a demo of the application of morphologic filters for the detector was presented. The second stage included a 6 months internship at the Thomson Corporate Research Lab in Princeton (NJ-USA) where the results refinement process was developed and implemented