A Maltese researcher has worked out a way to make miniature cameras smaller and more efficient.
Jeffrey Micallef, a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering at the University of Malta, has been trying to improve the digital video cameras used in miniature electronic devices.
Traditional video coding algorithms require the camera itself to examine the input video stream, making them bulky and expensive – and therefore harder to be integrated in miniature devices where computational power and resources are limited.
The research is seeking novel algorithms which could shift some of the computational burden to the decoder. This cutting-edge research could result in smaller, cheaper and lightweight cameras, with a reduced battery consumption, Micallef said.
He has proposed techniques that can improve the coding efficiency by up to 25 per cent and reduce the decoding delays by up to 32 per cent.
“Such cameras will find themselves useful in various applications, ranging from medical to security purposes. In medicine, these will facilitate the development of endoscopy capsules, which are small pills that can be swallowed by a patient to obtain a high quality video of the entire intestine. This enables doctor to analyse for abnormalities causing bleeding and offers major benefits over the traditional endoscopy or colonoscopy systems since it analyses a longer part of the intestine and can be performed in an outpatient environment.
“For surveillance systems, this coding paradigm will allow more cameras to be set up at the same cost and at higher resolution, allowing better coverage of the area under observation.
“The high quality video offered by these cameras compared to their analogue counterpart will also give the opportunity to better identify the face of the aggressors,” he said.
The research, carried out with the help of Steps scheme, led to the publication of eight conference papers and two journal articles in conferences and journals.