Frameless video system: emulating the human visual system

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The real world is analog and continuous in the most practical sense. The sound we hear has an amplitude variation over time, in a continuous and analog fashion. The light we sense through our eyes is also continuous both in amplitude and time, as the eye's retina receives a continuous flow of photons, sending that information to the brain through a chemical reaction. However, conventional video cameras cannot capture light information the way the human sees it, as they are limited to capturing discrete frames over time. Movies and videos are clever and sophisticated inventions that give the illusion of motion and realism to the human eyes, yet fooling them to believe they are seeing a faithful replica of the real world. The challenge of capturing video in discrete frames goes back to 1892, when Edison and Dickson developed a device called the Kinetoscope to view the resulting motion picture by playing back about 15 frames per second. It was until later that the addition of sound forced the frames to increase to 24 per second. Recently, these rates have significantly increased, but we continue treating video as a discrete sequence of images, imposing an unnecessary constraint on pixel information, dynamic range and precision, causing motion artifacts, compression challenges and an overall limited quality of experience. More importantly, this stroboscopic viewing is definitely tiresome to humans, as the eye and the brain have to provide the temporal integration necessary to perceive continuous motion. We believe that, considering the recent advances in video capturing and processing technologies, the time is ripe for a paradigm shift in the way we capture, process and display visual information, closely emulating the human visual system and its ability to perceive the continuity of the real world. Our long-term objective is to embark on a better understanding of the continuous time video representation and develop the framework and necessary technologies that will address visual quality, storage, delivery, and display requirements for frameless video, thus arriving at a more accurate rendition of the real world that is authentic and more pleasing to the eye. The implication to the digital media world is very significant. If frameless video shows promise, the broadcasting and entertainment industry, as well as the consumer electronics industry will have to embrace the opportunity to migrate to new ways to deliver entertainment, news and social media content to consumers. We suspect a similar reaction will have to occur for the computer vision community, driving significant new market opportunities across the digital media industries which represent some of the fastest growing sectors in the world, with a market growth rate of 25% and global sales forecast to hit US$215 billion by 2021.