For RGLAB 2020, France TV Lab teamed up with a number of companies, including Intel, Harmonic, VLC and Pixop, to explore the future of television.

France TV Lab was formed in 2016 and drives innovation at France TV in areas including design, new forms of management, new advertising formats and new content. Their stated goal is to create a space dedicated to reflection, knowledge sharing and best practices. Soon, they will implement a testing platform that will allow France Télévisions employees and the public to influence the implementation of new products through participation and responses to user tests.

At this year's RGLAB, the aim was to experiment with emerging technologies in the following four categories:

• Augmented reality: Enhancing the users perspective with augmented reality

• Augmented quality: Revisiting images of the past in UHD thanks to artificial intelligence

• Augmented speed: Showcasing video broadcast over 5G high-speed networks

• Augmented interactivity: Providing the user their choice of viewing experience

Pixop's AI and ML-powered algorithms were tested in the augmented quality category.

"We got an exciting opportunity to work on sports footage (thanks to our friends at Harmonic). Specifically, an SD NTSC clip in 16:9 aspect ratio from 2012," explains Jon Frydensbjerg, Pixop's CTO.

"Considering this was archival footage, the quality was very good, both in terms of production quality and how it was stored. We applied our filters in a sequence, first performing very light denoising before running our Deep Restoration filter to produce an intermediate HD version. A final UHD 4K version was then produced by running our Super Resolution algorithm on the intermediate HD output."

You can read more about the results here.

"We believe the partnership was fruitful and would welcome any opportunity to collaborate with France TV Lab and France TV in the future," says Morten Kolle, Pixop's CEO.

"We also wanted to thank Vincent Nalpas, director of innovation products & services, Jean-Paul Chevreux, innovation engineer and Yves-Marie Poirier, innovation engineer for their support."