Codemill in new EU-project – creating virtual fitting room

Codemill was recently granted funding by Horizon 2020, through Uminova Innovation and Enterprise Europe Network. Codemill will now participate in the EU-project ProCAMS coordinated by the Fraunhofer society, the well-known German developers of the MP3-format.

Fraunhofer will arrange a competition where scientists and individuals are invited to contribute with modules for various challenges related to video analysis. Codemill and the other companies in the project consortium will then take the winning modules one step further and turn them into marketable products.

The ambition of ProCAMS is to establish a win-win situation for the developers of intelligent video analysis applications and the creators of augmented media content. Noteworthy is that the project also has a clear equality agenda.

Codemill’s contribution

With several years of experience with MAM-system development and integration, Codemill will lead three sub-projects: “3D scanning for the fashion industry”, “Automatic tool for grouping occurrences of distinct individuals”, and “Automatic survey of customers’ mood”.

For the first sub-project we will receive a module for recreating a 3D-body from a video film. The possibility to recreate 3D-bodies from 2D-video can be useful e.g. when you need to order spare parts for a machine, or be sure you get the perfect fit when you order new clothes. For this, we will implement a virtual clothes tool for customized selections of clothes that will use the ProCAMS video analytics repository. In short, a virtual fitting room.

For the third sub-project we will receive a module for recognizing emotions to build a feedback system based on automatic emotion detection. Emotion recognition can be useful e.g. when you want to use a “clean” tool for evaluation, such as giving feedback to whether public toilets are well cleaned or not. Then you would just have to make a face in front of a camera instead of touching buttons or a screen.

Market changing

Expected impacts of ProCAMS are innovative solutions with high market potential ready to be deployed by European companies in the creative industry. The virtual clothes tool that Codemill will develop could be very useful for the fashion industry.

“It’s an ambitious project aiming to push the boundaries for practical video analysis, but the consortium is well put together and Fraunhofer has many successful projects on their resume” says Johanna Björklund, CTO at Codemill.

Now hiring

ProCAMS is to start in March this year, and will continue for two years – a short project in EU-standards. Codemill will dedicate a team of 5-7 developers for the implementation with Johanna Björklund acting as product owner.

“For this project, we intend to hire a senior IT-architect in the near future, and in the longer term additionally 2-3 developers” Johanna concludes.

About ProCAMS

ProCAMS, short for Promoting Creativeness in Augmented Media Services, is an EU-project aiming to develop a shared online library with components for intelligent video analysis. The library will then serve as a resource for companies working with video production.

To fill the library with components, there will be a competition. Each member of the project consortium has contributed with one or more challenges concerning video analysis. Anyone can hand in a software solution, and the winners with the best systems win an amount of money. The companies in the consortium will then develop software prototypes based on these solutions to show how they can be commercialized.

The project is led by the German research institute Fraunhofer FIT. Other members in the project consortium are CodeMill AB (Sweden), LT Multimedia (Italy), MOG Technologies SA (Portugal), ARWorks Ltd (Hungary), Lynceus Visual Technologies UG (Germany), PUCK AG (Germany), and Big Bad Wolf Ltd (Belgium).