Person of Interest App Contest Sep 29, 20223:25 UTC

Last week, VideoSurf launched a very special experience for viewers in conjunction with CBS’s new Fall TV drama Person of Interest from Executive Producers J.J. Abrams (Lost, Fringe, Alias) and Jonathan Nolan. The plot for the series relies upon state of the art technology and pattern recognition to help the lead characters find the “person of interest” in each episode. VideoSurf and its visual recognition technology was the perfect partnership to draw fans into the program experience - viewers can use the mobile app to identify the ‘person of interest’ in each episode. While watching Person of Interest, viewers can use the V-ID feature and point their phone at the television to capture a few seconds of the character they believe is the ‘person of interest’ that week. Once the character is correctly identified, viewers will be automatically entered to win a CBS-sponsored Sweepstakes, which includes weekly cash prizes and the Grand Prize trip to LA. This special engagement with CBS is part of what brings TV fans to VideoSurf – rich, engaging experiences which allow fans to deeply connect to the programs they love and encourage them to discover more favorite programming.

First Impressions: Fall 2011′s Period Dramas Sep 28, 20229:08 UTC

Fall 2011′s offering of period dramas have their eyes set on the 60s and fun locations like airplanes, night clubs, and railroad tracks. Things we can expect: solid colors, non-PC (and I don’t mean personal computer) dialogue, and maybe a few pop culture references. I wonder if there will be any cameos from 60s pop culture icons.

Where is history going to take us today?

First Impressions: Fall 2011′s New Comedies Sep 20, 202211:15 UTC

I counted a total of twelve new comedies premiering this season (the full list will be at the bottom) and shared with you the ones I found most promising or have the most buzz.

An iPhone First: Real-Time Visual Recognition of Live TV Sep 15, 20223:20 UTC

Our team was asked to visually identify TV shows and movies, along with the actors and characters in them, from a mobile phone, all in real time. This had never been done before on any platform, let alone a mobile phone. As computer vision scientists and engineers we knew that solving this problem would require high-quality optics and heavy-duty image processing.

To begin with we built a sophisticated server farm that analyzed both the video and audio content of over 75 popular TV channels in real-time and made it searchable at the same time our customers were watching it on live TV.

We had only a few seconds to capture the video and audio stream from our customer’s mobile phone, identify the television screen to sub-pixel accuracy for any brand and size of television in any lighting condition, search our huge corpus of content for the exact TV show and the precise moment for which the user was watching, perform real-time facial recognition of all of the actors in that exact moment, and return to our customer’s phone a detailed description of what they were watching, images of special moments from the show, the names and images of the actors in the show, a playable version of the show if it exists anywhere on the web, and recommend other videos our customer might enjoy. All of this processing had to happen in just a few seconds.

Our research of the smartphone market revealed that Apple’s iPhone provided an ideal platform to achieve this ambitious goal. The high quality optics in the iPhone 4 allowed us to visually identity the television screen in our customer’s living rooms, and the Apple A4 processor gave us the processing horsepower to process the real-time video feed at full HD 1280×720 resolution on a frame-by-frame basis to adjust for different lighting conditions and massively compress the video stream to achieve sub-second upload speeds to our servers.

Let me just say this again - the iPhone 4 allowed us to perform all of this processing in real-time and return detailed and meaningful results to our customers in just a few seconds. This has never been possible before the iPhone 4.

Apple’s developer tools and the iOS operating system allowed us to package this amazing functionality into a simple to use interface and deliver an app to the App Store within a few months.

Warmest regards,

Matt

Authored by Dr. Matthew D. Langston, Ph.D., Senior Software Engineer and Computer Vision Scientist responsible for iOS Development, VideoSurf, Inc.

First Impressions: Fall 2011′s Fantasy Dramas Sep 13, 20222:14 UTC

This blog post could also be known as “First Impressions: From the Creators of Awesome Fantasy Shows”. Four out of the five major broadcast networks (CBS - not pictured here) will premiere a Fantasy Drama developed by a previously successful creative team and they hopefully brought their “A” game. Remember: Mid-season replacements need not apply yet.

What has Fall 2011 got in store for us?