Year/Course: 2005-2006, Lent 2006

Contacts: PDr. Gabriel Brostow, Engineering
Mentor: Caren Weinberg

The Vision & Robotics Group at the Engineering Department has worked on a wide range of projects related to computer analysis of videos and photos.

The crowds project, carried out by Dr. Gabriel Brostow has focused on analysing security camera footage of crowds of people, and includes aspects such as tracking the path of individuals through successive video frames, identifying the number of people in the field of view over time, and identifying the direction of movement of the people.

The research is close to completion and is expected to be of value for a number of security-related applications, and possibly for designing better public spaces which match the actual human traffic movements. A major research milestone is due for completion by the end of January 2006, and the research project comes to an end in summer 2006, at which time a move to a commercialisation phase would be needed. Some early contacts have been made with commercial companies, in the UK and Israel, who will be introduced to the i-Team.

The i-Team will need to investigate the potential applications, potential customers and routes to market for products based on this technology. They will also look at what additional work would be needed to productise the technology to make it commercially viable, in order to assess whether this could be done best as a new spin-out company or by licensing the technology to an existing software developer.