TNO Technologies

An overview of the technologies provided by TNO:

• Virtual Director

  The Virtual Director makes web broadcasting available without the hassle of setting up cameras and hiring a camera crew. The system provides an automated video broadcast production with a fixed installation. The superb de-warping and stitching technology provides a natural looking corrected image with straight line markings. With this technology cost effective cameras can be used for complete coverage of the playing field. A pan and scanned image is automatically created by TNO’s game tracking technology. With the Virtual Director a sports game can be watched on any mobile device via standard web streaming technology.

• Virtual Lens

  To cover the complete playing field a set of 1 to 4 integrated cameras are positioned at the middle at a distance from the long side of the playing field. The video streams are stitched seamlessly together. An integrated calibration tool can be used to set the correct positions and dimensions of the playing field in the video images. With this calibration the system de-warps the stitched video ready for cutting-out the optimal pan and scan image based on the game detection algorithms.

• Multi-cam view

  As an extension to TNO’s Virtual Director multiple pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras can be connected to the master Virtual Director. The PTZ cameras follow players on the field pointed by the master Virtual Director from a different viewing angle. A smart slave Virtual Director will automatically select the region of interest on the PTZ camera image and control the PTZ to follow the selected players.

• Ball Tracking

  The Ball Tracking module focusses on players who pass the ball to other players so that the region of interest in the game can be easily broadcasted. With this technology, we can focus the virtual director on specific game actions.

• Hybrid Person Tracker

  The Hybrid Person Tracker (HPT) is a promising TNO technology that enables advanced content creation and accurate analytics for professional and non-professional outdoor sports teams. This is achieved by combining player localisation from video analytics with affordable, wearable sensor measurements. Target groups for products and services based on the HPT technology are: 1) Supporters, by providing personalised video streams, 2) Players, by providing personalised physical and tactical performance overviews, and 3) Trainers, caches and scouts that use sport analytics tools.

•  Person and Player Tracking

  TNO developed video tracking for many applications. For sports applications, player tracks can be used to analyse the player movements individually and as a team. Other applications include tracking people in a crowd to be able to analyse the movements as a result of influencing effects.

• Behaviour Detection

  Behaviour detection can be used as a tool to identify positive and negative behaviour as a result of an event or situation. Behaviour detection can also be used to predict if a situation will happen. One of the possible applications could be crowd control.

• People Re-identification

  Re-identification can be very useful to analyse behaviour of visitors. TNO re-identification techniques can be used to analyse people on an anonymous basis to be able to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• People Counting

  TNO algorithms can be used to detect and count people visible in a video image. This technique can be used in combination with people tracking to create heat-maps to identify the most and least crowded spots in an area.

• 5G R&D Platform

  For 5G PoCs and trials, TNO has developed its Hi5 platform that has all the features of a 5G network. Compared to the trial 5G networks currently offered by operators and vendors, Hi5 has the advantage that all interfaces and options are accessible to TNO and through that to the participants in the PoC/trials. Companies can develop their latest contribution, production and services based on this Hi5 platform.

• Transient Apps

  Users install 1 ‘basic transient app’. Based on the context the ‘basic transient app’ presents combinations of so called ‘app fragments’ that are only useful in the context of the moment users are in. These ‘app fragments’ appear and disappear based on the context of a user without any direct user actions. After installing the basic transient app, no need for downloading extra apps!

• Brainwave

  The brainwave platform classifies emotions via sensors that measure neurophysiology (EEG, heart rate, skin conduction, etc.) and context (location, time of day, movement, etc.). By using wearable sensors, continuous, objective and without disturbing the experience can be measured. So a brainwave application runs like an “emotion-tape recorder” with the experience. Brainwave has previously been used successfully in, among other things, an experiment with Arnon Grunberg, who wanted to know how his readers and at a theme park testing new entertainment facilities.

• Tiled Streaming

  Virtual Reality holds great promise, but streaming VR360 video over today’s networks is a considerable challenge. It just requires too much bandwidth to deliver an acceptable quality video stream that is responsive to head movements. The result is either a low quality image, or an experience that can make you feel sick – or both. ClearVR tiled streaming, a technology that we originally developed at TNO, solves these problems. ClearVR enables streaming of high quality VR360 video over existing networks, with a very snappy response to head motion. Tiledmedia’s Founders have worked on tiled streaming research since 2011, and the technology provides a perfect solution for the challenges posed by VR streaming.

• Social VR

  Social VR is real togetherness at a distance. A group of people (now up to 4, soon up to 10) can meet each other and interact photo-realistic in a virtual environment. It is as if they are really together, i.e. ultimately there is the feeling of non-mediation. This is accomplished using consumer hardware (RGB + depth cameras, VR headsets) and TNO’s web-based TogetherVR platform. This platform will be developed to the next level. Currently ‘work in progress’: scalability (increase the number of simultaneous users in a single virtual meeting), image processing (use computer vision technology to ‘remove’ the HMD from the video recordings, calculate alternative viewpoints for different users) and ease of use (automatic calibration, download-free setup, support of various cameras and VR headsets).