Andrew+Steer


 * Position** - Member of the Colour Recovery Working Group.


 * Employment** - Philips Research Labs, Redhill - 2001-2008 Display Systems Group, worked on OLED displays, LCD displays, design/test/use electronics to drive displays, design/test of TFT-based circuits-on-glass, colour/light/optical-measurement relating to displays.


 * Background** - University educated in Physics. Self-taught in electronics, programming, image-processing, digital signal processing etc. All-round practical can-do technical geek. Interested in most aspects of photography and imaging. Operated 35mm cinema projectors at UCL Film Society/Bloomsbury Theatre when I was a student there, and helped out on a couple of 16mm film-shoots.

Nine years ago, in 1999, I designed and wrote [|software to decode the PAL colour signal] embedded in single-field video-captures I'd made with [|homebrew capture hardware] I'd designed and built several years previously. Purely for self-amusement, back in 2000 I wrote an algorithm to //perfectly// recover VideoCrypt-scambled television frames, using an enhanced line-correlation approach which which was completely novel in taking great advantage of the embedded PAL chrominance signal!


 * Interest in the Group** - I first stumbled across this group from a link to the Guardian story from the uk.tech.broadcast newsgroup which I keep an eye on. It seemed an interesting challenge, and one for which I had significant experience. Being a hands-on physicist, I particularly enjoy problems which have an engineering component - where the "real world" has intruded and a purely theoretical solution may not be enough. Somewhere where an algorithm or approach with a bit of "knack" (from in-the-field experience) built into it can make all the difference...


 * Skills offered** - Specific experience of signal-processing of PAL, C++ coding, mathematics, image-processing, etc.


 * Contribution so far** - convincing proof-of-concept for single-frame Colour Recovery. See Algorithmic approaches - thoughts here.

12 April 2008

Further contributions through summer 2008 - created code to decode (single quadrant) colour of video sequences, e.g. 30-second Top of the Pops clip. This generated a lot of interest that the method was viable, and later Richard Russell devised methods for doing four-quadrant / full-colour decode.

Employment - summer 2008 onwards - Sci/Tech consultant at Sagentia Ltd, in Cambridge,

31 Dec 2012