Master in Architectural and Evironmental Acoustics from La Salle University, Barcelona. Producer and director, has been in TV Commercials p...read more

Master in Architectural and Evironmental Acoustics from La Salle University, Barcelona. Producer and director, has been in TV Commercials production for over 30 years. Since 2013, he owns a post production house in Costa Rica where he also works as sound designer and mixing engineer.

In teaching, he regularly gives workshops and was director of the Post-production Technician career at CETAV (Visual Arts and Technology Center).

A piano player, he has performed in many bands, solo concerts and has composed the music for many films.
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Brief description.

This invention consists of the capture and recording of the location (real time position) in the three-dimensional space of the original sound sources; it also consists of the capture and recording of the spatiality information of the original location...read more

Brief description.

This invention consists of the capture and recording of the location (real time position) in the three-dimensional space of the original sound sources; it also consists of the capture and recording of the spatiality information of the original location. Finally, the processed information is used to reproduce the sound in cinemas and homes in a three-dimensional way. The same position information is applied to the new voices recorded later as dubbing, so that the spatiality of the sound is maintained in the different versions or languages of the film. All of the above is achieved automatically, reducing post-production costs and greatly improving the viewer's experience.


Abstract

It is a system for obtaining and recording the continuous real time position information of a sound source and its relationship with a film or video camera (real or virtual), to be automatically reproduced during the exhibition of an audiovisual piece.

It is also a method of recording and processing of sound that allows positioning the original sound source in a three-dimensional space.

It is also a method to define a physical space by its acoustic characteristics, information that can be incorporated further down the post production process.

It allows to automatically move around a surround sound system the voices of actors and characters, following their original movement in front of the camera. It allows to apply this same movement to additional language versions, automatically.

Currently, the voices of the characters of a film are reproduced in the Center channel. This is done not because we cannot manually pan the voices to follow their relative position in the screen; but because if we did so, we would have to redo all processing and mixing for every single language the film is dubbed to. With our system, the positional data recorded on set can be applied to new versions of the film, automatically.

It is a new system. It creates a new workflow for the recording, post production and exhibition of sound for film and video. It opens a new creative possibility by freeing the movement of the dialogs in the surround space; at the same time, it allows to produce copies of the film in different languages, keeping this voice movements. And all this, while saving time, and money in the post production process.


Note: This system is covered in the USPTO Application #17/394.145 (Notice of Allowance 7698 of 03/27/23).
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Since 2014, DIEHL Eric is VP security and media technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment. He explores and evaluates security solutions as ...read more

Since 2014, DIEHL Eric is VP security and media technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment. He explores and evaluates security solutions as well as new paradigms of content consumption and production, such as blockchain, point of clouds, and fast encryption. Previously, he founded and led the Technicolor Security Laboratories for more than 15 years. This team of 33 experts designed technologies such as advanced key management, audio and video watermarks, fingerprinting, network security, and secure coding.

He filed over 110 patents in security, Pay TV, blockchain, home network, and User Interface. He published many papers and two books: “Securing Digital Video” and “Ten Laws for Security.” He regularly blogs about security at https://www.eric-diehl.com/.
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Managing theatrical releases is a complex business task. It encompasses defining releases for many territories, granting rights to distributors depending on their territories, and setting release dates per territory. The release date is a crucial factor in success. Unfortunate...read more

Managing theatrical releases is a complex business task. It encompasses defining releases for many territories, granting rights to distributors depending on their territories, and setting release dates per territory. The release date is a crucial factor in success. Unfortunately, this management is currently ad-hoc and non-optimal.
Blockchain is a promising technology outside cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFT). Atheneum is a blockchain designed to manage theatrical releases. The blockchain is permissioned, i.e., each participant is known and identified. Atheneum defines an ecosystem matching the current scheme. It has studios, studio members managed by their respective studios, distributors, and observers. Studios create titles. Their studio members create releases for a given territory and a release date for each release. The studio members grant releases to distributors. Observers get access to the release dates of every release.
Using a robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Atheneum reduces the risk of error or malevolent actions. The smart contract ensures consistency between the release and distributor territories. The smart contract enforces consistency when a studio modifies a title's release dates.
As Atheneum is a permissioned blockchain based on Hyperledger Fabric, all the members are known. A set of trustees grant access to new members and may revoke the access of some members. To reduce the corresponding operational cost and accelerate the treatment time, Atheneum implements an advanced Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO). Once every trustee votes electronically, the blockchain DAO automatically enforces their decision. A smart contract implements the voting, the decision policy, and the enforcement of the decision.
Atheneum offers robust security as every operation requires strong authentication of the requesting members. The RBAC uses this strong authentication. As for any blockchain, Atheneum presents high availability and resilience. Many nodes provide robust replication of the information. An additional advantage of using a blockchain is transparency and traceability. Atheneum records every requested operation in its ledger. As operations are blockchain transactions, they are tamper-resistant. The DAO uses an Atheneum smart contract and thus presents the same benefits.
The paper exposes the business challenges and benefits brought by Atheneum. It details Atheneum and its implementation.
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Doh-Suk Kim is leading a team at Dolby Laboratories for research in the area of QoE-aware media processing and delivery. In the past, his re...read more

Doh-Suk Kim is leading a team at Dolby Laboratories for research in the area of QoE-aware media processing and delivery. In the past, his responsibilities included leading and developing perceptually-motivated speech processing, subjective test methodologies, and objective models for characterizing various performance aspects of rich media conferencing systems, such as capturing/rendering of the spatial audio scene, heterogeneous multi-party conversation, and audio-video congruence.

His career has spanned more than 30 years of R&D to address various speech processing and perceptual performance issues at Bell Labs, Samsung Electronics, Alcatel-Lucent, and Huawei Technologies. He is also active in standard organizations such as ITU-T and ANSI. His direct/indirect contributions to the standard recommendations include ANSI ATIS-0100005.2006 (ANIQUE+: objective speech quality estimation model, 2006), ITU-T P.340 Annex B (2014), ITU-T P.1311 (2014) and ITU-T P.1312 (2016).

Doh-Suk Kim received Ph.D. degree in EE from KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. was the Lead Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing Special Issue on Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio.
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Efficiently transmitting media while maintaining or improving the quality of experience (QoE) poses a constant challenge, particularly with the increasing demand for higher bitrates due to increasing video resolutions, bit-depths, and frame rates. On the media playback side, ther...read more

Efficiently transmitting media while maintaining or improving the quality of experience (QoE) poses a constant challenge, particularly with the increasing demand for higher bitrates due to increasing video resolutions, bit-depths, and frame rates. On the media playback side, there exists a variety of factors affecting the resulting QoE perceived by end users. These factors include device characteristics, viewing conditions, and individual visual acuity. For example, a low-resolution video may appear to be of the same quality as a full-resolution video to users who may have limited ability to see fine details due to factors such as long viewing distance, myopia, or low display brightness or contrast settings. Thus, understanding the characteristics of playback-side context can provide opportunities for optimizing media delivery tailored to each user.
We present a novel approach to estimating viewers' visible frequency ranges by creating hybrid images in a quantitatively controlled manner. The proposed approach, which can be applied to adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming optimization, combines low- and high-frequency components of two different images providing multiscale image perception. The proposed method is designed to adjust the hybrid image size and the cutoff frequencies of lowpass and highpass filters of hybrid image synthesis according to the given frequency range under test. This method can be used for estimating the minmax QoE resolution, which is defined as the minimum video resolution providing maximum QoE, in any viewing conditions and devices. When an image is presented below this resolution, the user perceives a difference from the reference image at its maximum resolution on the display.
Our experimental results reveal a strong correlation between the minmax QoE resolution obtained from hybrid image perception tasks and the traditional just noticeable difference (JND) of real images of different resolutions when presented side-by-side. These JND tasks exhibit a wider spread both in minmax QoE resolution estimation and elapsed time to complete the tasks, potentially due to the complexity of the cognitive process and the variability caused by contents and subjects. In contrast, our hybrid image technique achieves more stable results with much less effort and fatigue, due to salient feature detection and the Gestalt principle of closure for image completion. In addition, the study finds that the results of typical side-by-side JND tasks are susceptible to the selection of test images or videos, whereas the hybrid image perception tasks show much less dependency on the selection of stimuli.
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