Towards Big Data Management and Visualisation: Enabling Technologies for High Resolution Content Interchange and Delivery

High definition content is becoming an integral part of global broadcasting, setting the standard for streaming, satellite, cable and terrestrial transmissions. More importantly, it is generating extremely large amounts of data that need to be delivered to a large number of users. Up to now, the distribution of conventional media has only been made possible by the application of compression systems that reduce the size of content sufficiently to be stored and distributed on a mass scale. Continuing this trend and exploiting recent breakthroughs in compression technology, the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard provides a base for handling very high resolution content. Underpinning the capabilities of HEVC are computationally expensive, extremely complex and resource demanding algorithms. Consequently, in its current state, HEVC is unfeasible for practical applications involving very high definition content. The main objective of this project is to research and develop economically viable, i.e., resource constrained, technology for very high definition content handling. The goal is to facilitate storage and transmission of the huge amounts of data contained in very high resolution content, paving a way for the provision of much greater quality of experience, facilitating quick deployment in a variety of important applications and sectors including broadcasting, digital cinema, medical, biological and defence.