The COGNITUS project produced technological results beyond the state-of-the-art through the final unified solution, and the individual technological components which leverage artificial intelligence based algorithms for media enhancements. Innovations centred around: UGC and production convergence; quality of experience, UHD broadcasting and HDR, content enhancement, reward schemes for media content crowdsourcing in the creative industries, data compression and data coding, and creation of an immersive sound experience from the audio content of UGCs.
Key innovative features of the COGNITUS platform include quality assessment for quality control and enhancement of the UGC for creating high quality UHD experiences. Features include spatial upscaling, framerate up-conversion, and dynamic range adaptation as visual enhancement mechanisms. Refinement modules, such as video stabilisation and portrait-to-landscape modules are also offered. Semantic enrichment of the metadata is achieved deep-learning algorithms which associate media annotations with respective visual and text data. Various audio enhancement tools handle a number of distortions that can occur in UGC such as wind noise or clipping, as well as audio synchronisation for alignment of overlapping audio and video streams.
COGNITUS offers an advanced, fast and efficient video delivery system, capable of supporting new video formats (such as UHD, HDR and High Frame Rates (HFR)). An HTTP adaptive streaming paradigm, and capable of efficiently compressing using an open source HEVC encoder is supported.
The innovation COGNITUS results are published across reputed and peer-reviewed journals and conferences. The published knowledge will lead to improved research environments and influence in academia. COGNITUS may further influence education on media in areas such as UGC-based production techniques as well as reward schemes for crowdsourcing services.
COGNITUS contributes to social innovation by providing tools that aim to increase productivity in specific aspects of media industry. The media industry is often considered as one of most rapidly growing, leading to increased employment of younger generations, which is not typical for all sectors. Most importantly, the COGNITUS concept in which all people can become content creators (and producers have access to tools to create new programmes) has potential to enable new creative services, processes and experiences.
