The following Q and A answers many common questions about LYYNT V.E.T. and what to expect from implementing V.E.T. in different products and environments.
However, the best answer often comes from seeing with your own eyes. Check out these sample LYNNified videos. Click links to view and 'read more for even more info and samples. Contact Bill at ROV Downunder for more information.
LYYN™ V.E.T. - Visibility Enhancement Technology
How do you do it?
LYYNT V.E.T. is a result of many years of research in the human vision system. By enhancing image components that stimulate the human interpretation and understanding of images, more data is used by the brains filtering system. The effect is that we see more features through many visual disturbances.
But how do you really do it?
When we look at something, signals from red-sensitive, blue-sensitive and green-sensitive receptors in the eye retinae travel to centers in the brain, where we interprete them, understand them, "see" them; hopefully recognize a pattern or a shape. What we call color is a particular balance of signals from the red, green and blue receptors. In an equal signal mixture, we only see shades of white, gray or black, and no color.
The eye and brain can discern only about two dozen shades of gray. But if there is even the slightest hint of unbalance in the R, G B in-signals, the eye and brain can separate thousands of color shades and intensities. Thus color, if at all existant in a picture, is a powerful descriptor that often simplifies object identification and extraction from a scene.
The LYYNT procedure extracts even the faintest traces of color in a picture, perhaps unvisible to the un-aided eye, and processes them so the brain can thus better understand what it perceives.
This is where the LYYNT process is better then a pure contrast (grayness) enhancer....it helps the human brain use its best strength...color separation and object identification even in an apparently "gray" scene.
Can you do it on any video source?
As long as the source is color video or images, analog or digital, the answer is yes. The source video stream is converted to the LYYNT V.E.T. internal digital format, processed, and then converted back to the original video format. Any color camera, new or already in use, can be given new features like enhanced viewing in fog, rain, dust, snow, etc. Many cameras are also given new low light abilities.
That must be time consuming?
Because of the highly efficient coding most "normal" standards can be handled on standard HW platforms with a system delay of no more than 140 microseconds.
What about monochrome/grayscale?
The human vision interpretation is very color oriented, which means that LYYNT V.E.T. is also color oriented. We have limited results on monochrome/grayscale material.
On your site you have some low light samples. How low can you go?
This is dependant on the camera system. We need a signal from the camera sensor to calculate on. But that signal can be so weak that the unprocessed material is completely black. However, when the lighting situation turns that bad the camera might run into other problems, for instance the auto focus tends to fail. An out of focus image will still be blurry after our processing.
Also, in low light situations the camera sensors often generate a lot of video noise, which is visible in the processed material. But, it is still possible to interpret and identify objects in the image, which is a very important feature in many video applications. And we do this in color, where other low light technologies generate a monochrome image.
What if we have limited bandwidth?
With limited bandwidth often comes different types of video compression algorithms. These are very good at removing data from images without decreasing the visible result too much. However, it is very often that "non-visible" information that LYYNT V.E.T. uses for it's calculations. You can say that less compression equals less data removed, equals a better result. Or to put in another way: "The rawer, the better".The result is also dependant on video-codecs, color-depth, resolution, camera optics, sensor type etc. The better the camera system the better our result is.
Can I select only a small area of a frame and only process that part of the frame?
What happens if the visibility is good? Do you in some way "destroy" the image then?
On the contrary. If the visibility is excellent, we still have a small positive effect. The image is often perceived as "clearer", similar to the way you might see things if you replaced a simple plastic optics with a state of the art glass optics.
