Helge Seetzen

Last updated
Helge Seetzen
Born (1978-06-23) June 23, 1978 (age 45)
Nationality German
Alma mater University of British Columbia
Occupation(s)Technologist and Entrepreneur
Known for HDR
Partner Dominique Anglade
Children3

Helge Seetzen (born June 23, 1978) is a German technologist and businessman known for imaging & multimedia research and commercialization.

Contents

Seetzen was active in the development of high dynamic range imaging (HDR) technology [1] and several of his patents cover aspects of this technology. He won the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada 2009 Innovation Challenge Award for his work with HDR Technology.

Biography

Seetzen left his native Germany to study physics at the University of British Columbia in 1998. [2] He received BS and PhD degrees in physics and related disciplines from that university, where he first became active in imaging technology research that led to the development of HDR.

Business career

From 2002 to 2004, Seetzen was a co-founder and director of Sunnybrook Technologies, a Vancouver-based start-up developing electronic display technologies. In 2004, the firm split, and he became co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of BrightSide Technologies, a Vancouver-based developer of High dynamic range imaging-based electronic display technologies. After Brightside was purchased by Dolby Laboratories in 2007, [2] he joined Dolby Canada Corp., becoming director of HDR Technology at Dolby from 2008 to 2010.

In early 2010, Seetzen founded TandemLaunch, a Montreal-based technology transfer acceleration company and venture capital fund [2] that works with academic researchers to commercialize their technological developments. [3] Seetzen is CEO and Managing Partner of the firm, and directs the company’s strategy and operations. Under his leadership, TandemLaunch has raised four venture funds [4] and created over 35 companies including LandR and has been recognized particularly for supporting women founders. [5]

Technical societies

Seetzen is a president of the Society for Information Display, where he has held roles including Chair of the Publications Committee, [6] including oversight of The Journal of the SID,, [7] Information Display magazine, and related publications, as well as, Treasurer, Secretary [8] and currently as President-Elect of the Society. He also served as the 2010 Program Chair and 2012 General Chair of Display Week, [9] a technical symposium on displays. He serves on the boards of several public organisations including Canada's largest academic scholarship program MITACS, the entrepreneurship program of Montreal's business school HEC and the technology transfer committee of Montreal's AI initiative IVADO. In 2018, he was appointed by the Governor General of Canada to serve on the governance council of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. [10]

Publications

Seetzen’s work includes contributions to published research on high dynamic range display systems, [11] [12] High-Luminance HDR, [13] and photometric image processing, [14] and of subjects related to image display, resolution, and luminance.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-exposure HDR capture</span> Technique to capture HDR images and videos

In photography and videography, multi-exposure HDR capture is a technique that creates high dynamic range (HDR) images by taking and combining multiple exposures of the same subject matter at different exposures. Combining multiple images in this way results in an image with a greater dynamic range than what would be possible by taking one single image. The technique can also be used to capture video by taking and combining multiple exposures for each frame of the video. The term "HDR" is used frequently to refer to the process of creating HDR images from multiple exposures. Many smartphones have an automated HDR feature that relies on computational imaging techniques to capture and combine multiple exposures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dolby</span> Audio technology company

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. is a British-American technology corporation specializing in audio noise reduction, audio encoding/compression, spatial audio, and HDR imaging. Dolby licenses its technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3D display</span> Display device

A 3D display is a display device capable of conveying depth to the viewer. Many 3D displays are stereoscopic displays, which produce a basic 3D effect by means of stereopsis, but can cause eye strain and visual fatigue. Newer 3D displays such as holographic and light field displays produce a more realistic 3D effect by combining stereopsis and accurate focal length for the displayed content. Newer 3D displays in this manner cause less visual fatigue than classical stereoscopic displays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-dynamic-range rendering</span> Rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in high-dynamic-range

High-dynamic-range rendering, also known as high-dynamic-range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in high dynamic range (HDR). This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios. Video games and computer-generated movies and special effects benefit from this as it creates more realistic scenes than with more simplistic lighting models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tone mapping</span> Image processing technique

Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map one set of colors to another to approximate the appearance of high-dynamic-range (HDR) images in a medium that has a more limited dynamic range. Print-outs, CRT or LCD monitors, and projectors all have a limited dynamic range that is inadequate to reproduce the full range of light intensities present in natural scenes. Tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from the scene radiance to the displayable range while preserving the image details and color appearance important to appreciate the original scene content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autostereoscopy</span> Any method of displaying stereoscopic images without the use of special headgear or glasses

Autostereoscopy is any method of displaying stereoscopic images without the use of special headgear, glasses, something that affects vision, or anything for eyes on the part of the viewer. Because headgear is not required, it is also called "glasses-free 3D" or "glassesless 3D". There are two broad approaches currently used to accommodate motion parallax and wider viewing angles: eye-tracking, and multiple views so that the display does not need to sense where the viewer's eyes are located. Examples of autostereoscopic displays technology include lenticular lens, parallax barrier, and may include Integral imaging, but notably do not include volumetric display or holographic displays.

High dynamic range (HDR), also known as wide dynamic range, extended dynamic range, or expanded dynamic range, is a signal with a higher dynamic range than usual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Levoy</span>

Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.

BrightSide Technologies Inc. was a firm spun-out from the Structured Surface Physics Laboratory of the University of British Columbia, developing and commercializing electronic display technologies, specifically high brightness display technology called HDR. The privately held company also developed technology for capturing, processing, and storage of HDR images. BrightSide's headquarters were in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It was acquired by Dolby Laboratories, Inc. in April 2007 for US$28 million.

Contrast, in physics and digital imaging, is a quantifiable property used to describe the difference in appearance between elements within a visual field. It is closely linked with the perceived brightness of objects and is typically defined by specific formulas that involve the luminances of the stimuli. For example, contrast can be quantified as ΔL/L near the luminance threshold, known as Weber contrast, or as LH/LL at much higher luminances. Further, contrast can result from differences in chromaticity, which are specified by colorimetric characteristics such as the color difference ΔE in the CIE 1976 UCS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luminance HDR</span>

Luminance HDR, formerly Qtpfsgui, is graphics software used for the creation and manipulation of high-dynamic-range images. Released under the terms of the GPL, it is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Luminance HDR supports several High Dynamic Range (HDR) as well as Low Dynamic Range (LDR) file formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hybrid log–gamma</span> High dynamic range standard that was jointly developed by the BBC and NHK

The hybrid log–gamma (HLG) transfer function is a transfer function jointly developed by the BBC and NHK for high dynamic range (HDR) display. It's backward compatible with the transfer function of SDR. It was approved as ARIB STD-B67 by the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB). It is also defined in ATSC 3.0, Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) UHD-1 Phase 2, and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Rec. 2100.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HDR10</span> Open HDR standard

HDR10 Media Profile, more commonly known as HDR10, is an open high-dynamic-range video (HDR) standard announced on August 27, 2015, by the Consumer Technology Association. It is the most widespread HDR format.

Standard-dynamic-range video is a video technology which represents light intensity based on the brightness, contrast and color characteristics and limitations of a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. SDR video is able to represent a video or picture's colors with a maximum luminance around 100 cd/m2, a black level around 0.1 cd/m2 and Rec.709 / sRGB color gamut. It uses the gamma curve as its electro-optical transfer function.

ITU-R Recommendation BT.2100, more commonly known by the abbreviations Rec. 2100 or BT.2100, introduced high-dynamic-range television (HDR-TV) by recommending the use of the perceptual quantizer or hybrid log–gamma (HLG) transfer functions instead of the traditional "gamma" previously used for SDR-TV.

The perceptual quantizer (PQ), published by SMPTE as SMPTE ST 2084, is a transfer function that allows for HDR display by replacing the gamma curve used in SDR. It is capable of representing luminance level up to 10000 cd/m2 (nits) and down to 0.0001 nits. It has been developed by Dolby and standardized in 2014 by SMPTE and also in 2016 by ITU in Rec. 2100. ITU specifies the use of PQ or HLG as transfer functions for HDR-TV. PQ is the basis of HDR video formats and is also used for HDR still picture formats. PQ is not backward compatible with the BT.1886 EOTF, while HLG is compatible.

High-dynamic-range television (HDR-TV) is a technology that uses high dynamic range (HDR) to improve the quality of display signals. It is contrasted with the retroactively-named standard dynamic range (SDR). HDR changes the way the luminance and colors of videos and images are represented in the signal, and allows brighter and more detailed highlight representation, darker and more detailed shadows, and more intense colors.

HDR10+ is a high dynamic range (HDR) video technology that adds dynamic metadata to HDR10 source files. The dynamic metadata are used to adjust and optimize each frame of the HDR video to the consumer display's capabilities in a way based on the content creator's intentions.

Images and videos use specific transfer functions to describe the relationship between electrical signal, scene light and displayed light.

Wolfgang Heidrich is a German-Canadian computer scientist and Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), for which he served as the director of Visual Computing Center from 2014 to 2021. He was previously a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he was a Dolby Research Chair (2008-2013). His research has combined methods from computer graphics, optics, machine vision, imaging, inverse methods, and perception to develop new Computational Imaging and Display technologies. His more recent interest focuses on hardware-software co-design of the next generation of imaging systems, with applications such as high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, compact computational cameras, hyper-spectral cameras, wavefront sensors, to name just a few.

References

  1. ↑ "Display Brighter Than Film". Technology Research News. 2003-09-10. Retrieved 2011-12-17.
  2. 1 2 3 "Businessman's success helps launch startups". The Montreal Gazette. 2010-02-28. Retrieved 2011-12-18.
  3. ↑ "Montreal Tech Watch". 25 Jan 2011. Archived from the original on 2012-01-10.
  4. ↑ "TandemLaunch announces initial closing of $12 million for its third fund". BetaKit. Retrieved 2017-05-25.
  5. ↑ "Montreal's TandemLaunch puts a twist on startup strategy". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2017-05-25.
  6. ↑ "SIDGovernance". 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-02-06.
  7. ↑ "SIDJournal". 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-02-06.
  8. ↑ "SID appoints new executive leadership team". 2012.
  9. ↑ "SIDJournal". 2012.
  10. ↑ "Appointments to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada".
  11. ↑ "SID03Digest" (PDF). 2003.
  12. ↑ Seetzen, Helge; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Stuerzlinger, Wolfgang; Ward, Greg; Whitehead, Lorne; Trentacoste, Matthew; Ghosh, Abhijeet; Vorozcovs, Andrejs (2003). "High dynamic range display systems". ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers. Siggraph '04. Vol. 23. pp. 760–768. doi:10.1145/1186562.1015797. ISBN   9781450378239. S2CID   2027619.{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  13. ↑ "IEEE Journal of Display Technologies". Dec 2008. doi:10.1109/JDT.2008.2001198. S2CID   17829653.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  14. ↑ Trentacoste, Matthew; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Whitehead, Lorne; Seetzen, Helge; Ward, Greg (2007). "Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation". 18 (5): 439–451. doi:10.1016/j.jvcir.2007.06.006. hdl: 2429/17558 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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