Research Into Sonification of Video/Depth Data (University Dissertation)

Mon, Aug 3, 2015

I have recently completed my Undergraduate Degree in Computer Science at Cardiff University. My final year project was on the topic of “Video to Audio Conversion for the Visually Impaired”.

The project was quite broad, research-heavy, and in an area that I had little experience in – so it was quite a learning experience!

Using an Asus XTION Camera to retrieve both RGB and Depth information from the environment, I experimented with ways of extracting shapes from the footage (in real-time), extracting various properties from these shapes (including Hu invariant moments and Elliptical Fourier co-efficients), using properties to calculate shape-similarity, and conveying this information in the form of audio.

I intend to write some posts detailing these individual topics, but in the mean time, if you’re interested, my dissertation can be downloaded here. As I mentioned, it’s a fairly broad, whistle-stop tour of the approaches I took in attempting to solve the problem posed, and is by no means a “ground truth”.

I’m returning to Cardiff in October as a PhD Student, working on another computer-vision related project.