IBC: BBC Paper on HDR Gets IBC Award

As more companies explore the idea of improving the visual quality of movies and television programming with high dynamic range (HDR) images in HD or 4K productions, the IBC has announced that the IBC 2015 Conference Prize will be awarded to Andrew Cotton and Tim Borer of BBC Research & Development for their paper “A display independent high dynamic range television system.”

The Conference Prize is given each year for outstanding contributions that advance industry knowledge.

The BBC paper discusses how HDR can be delivered and displayed while remaining compatible with conventional systems.

The paper and proposal are notable because the proposal comes at a time when there are a number of different approaches to HDR and various organizations are working on developing industry standards to handle HDR and wider color gamut.

The paper will be presented at IBC on Friday, Sept. 11 at 2 p.m.

“This year’s winner describes a novel solution that could fundamentally influence how we perceive tomorrow’s ultra-high definition video,” said Dr. Nick Lodge, chair of the technical papers committee in a statement, “In their very clear paper, Andrew and Tim explain how they brought together theory in engineering and visual psychology, along with practical experiments, to arrive at a high quality, flexible representation of high dynamic range video. This is creative technology at its very best.”

“We are delighted that IBC has recognized our paper on a display-independent HDR television system,” the two BBC technologists said in a statement. “We believe that the technical solution we have presented provides the best universal approach for HDR, allowing it to rapidly become part of mainstream UHD offerings internationally.”