CENIC Honors High-Resolution Streaming Demonstration

Bookmark and Share

Wed, 03/28/2012 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

An international collaboration to stream live ultra-high-definition 60 frame per second microscopic video at the Tokyo International Film Festival has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as recipient of the 2012 Innovations in Networking Awards for Experimental/Developmental Applications. Live digital cinema streaming and the sharing of high-resolution scientific imaging have emerged as killer apps for advanced networks and during the Tokyo International Film Festival's CineGrid session last October they were combined with microscopy at 4K/60P for the first time as 4K microscopic images of living microorganisms at 60 frames per second were captured and streamed live from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts across the Pacific Ocean to an audience in Tokyo. Network connectivity provided by USC CENIC AboveNet CineGrid CISCO Cwave Pacific Wave and Japan's JGN-X formed the 10 Gigabit trans-Pacific path that enabled this event. USC Cinematic Arts' Richard Weinberg project leader and international digital media research consortium CineGrid had previously demonstrated simultaneous 4k microscopic image capture and live HD streaming from USC to UCSD in San Diego and to the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Yokohama Japan in 2009. With the addition of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Network Innovation Laboratory members and JPEG2000 codec technology to the project the demonstration in October brought a dramatic increase in the resolution of the live image transmission increasing the resolution from HD to 4K/60fps achieving a fourfold increase in number of pixels and a doubling of the frame rate. Members of the audience in Tokyo witnessed the benefit of seeing live aquatic microorganisms invisible to the naked eye at the highest resolution and frame rates yet achieved at that distance with less than a second's delay from Los Angeles. Four Innovations on Networking Awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations that leverage ultra high-bandwidth networking particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas. CENIC www.cenic.org