Latin America. Christie and the University of Waterloo's Image Processing and Vision Laboratory are celebrating a new milestone: the development and production of the proprietary algorithm that drives the resolution improvement of the new Christie M 4K25 RGB pure laser projector. This is the latest success between the renowned institution and Christie, who together recently completed a third two-year research project.
The collaboration between the University of Waterloo's Image Processing and Vision Laboratory and Christie began in 2013.
"Years ago, we identified a number of issues that we were looking for help with," said Mark Lamm, senior product developer, Advanced Research and Collaboration at Christie. "The University of Waterloo group is working on camera and vision research and, more recently, machine learning. It was beneficial for both parties, as we had a problem and they had an interest in solving it."
Waterloo and Christie have collaborated on articles, presentations and patents on three projects. Each project involved eight to 10 graduate students and included an internship that allowed students to devote two days a week to Christie's research.
"Christie's people appreciate the research aspect as we give them ideas and insights," said Paul Fieguth, a professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo. "We are committed to working together and sharing the direction of our research, as well as contributing ideas to Christie's research goals."
The research that led to the algorithm for the new M 4K25-RGB pure laser projector began several years ago and resulted in published articles on image enhancement in static images. The research continued when the team realized that the approach only worked for still images and not for videos.
"We wondered if we could figure out in real time the movement of the image and how it detects what a pixel is doing. Then we had to figure out how to filter and recombine it appropriately," Fieguth said of the ongoing investigation. "That was the crux of most of the work on image resolution that the students were doing. It took us a while to refine what we were looking for."
The result of part of the research project is the new patented precision technology "pixel shift" present in the Christie M 4K25 RGB pure laser projector, which reduces or eliminates typical artifacts found in other pixel shift technologies and provides a 4K UHD resolution of up to 120 Hz.
The collaboration between the University of Waterloo and Christie is already heading towards a possible fourth research project. "We are very pleased with the research collaboration with the University of Waterloo's Imaging and Vision Processing Laboratory," Lamm said. "At Christie we look forward to welcoming the next group of researchers."
