A Launceston team has taken out second place in Tasmania’s innovation hackathon competition.
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UHack is open to University of Tasmania students and to the public, and allows innovators, creative minds, and problem solvers to create tech-based solutions to real-world problems.
Garrett White, Josh Cooper, and Matthew White came second in UHack’s open category.
The competition involved teams spending three days developing a software application, a business model, and a pitch video.
The work was then reviewed by a panel of judges.
Garrett White said their team built a new way of compressing video which “far exceeded current benchmarks”.
“That’s the idea of our business. We call it genetic video compression,” he said.
“It has never been done before. It’s using state of the art technology.
“With the results that we’ve had, our worst case result is better than the first case result of conventional [video compression].”
Josh Cooper said there was a problem with traditional approaches to video compression.
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“You have to approximate what data is redundant to an actual human,” he said.
“So, with video, it’s like what do people visually perceive? What’s important to that?
“An example of that is high-frequency details in an image, and that’s basically what JPEGs do to compress – they isolate the high frequency details and get rid of them.
“The idea is that we train a neural network to take the place of a human, so the neural network looks at the compressed image and determines what the quality is. If we use that, it gives us an optimisation goal.”
Mr White said in the future, video compression would become a “massive industry”.
“Any technology that can be cost saving for that industry is going to make a lot of money,” he said.
“That’s more or less what our project is intended to do.”
The team felt good about coming second in the state and winning $4000 in prize money.
“We were inventing a new type of technology, and it didn’t fit into the criteria so well,” Mr White said.
“But, they told us because of that, they’ll be changing the criteria for next year.
“It was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed it.”
- UHack ran from July 13 to 15 in Launceston, Burnie, and Hobart.