Topics in Preservation Science
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VisualAudio: A Preservation Strategy for Fragile Disk Recordings by Means of Photography
October 17, 2005, 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.
Dining Room A, 6th floor James Madison Building
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
The optical retrieval and storage technique called VisualAudio [http://www.eif.ch/visualaudio]
provides a way to extract sound information from a phonograph record
without any mechanical contact. The process involves three steps: 1)
A picture of each side of the record is taken using a dedicated analog
camera, and the film is stored as the working copy; 2) The film is scanned;
and 3) The image is processed to extract the sound. The technique can
be used to retrieve the sound of older records that are so poorly deteriorated
that no regular turntable can be used. A working system has been built
and has already been used to retrieve the sound from several records.
This talk will describe the principles and characteristics of the different
parts of the system and the performance, which is to be used in 2006
to retrieve the sound from several thousand old records.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Ottar Johnsen, Professor of Signal Processing and Telecommunications at the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland (Fribourg), earned a diploma in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of technology (EPFL) in 1974 and a PhD from EPFL in 1979. He worked as a research and teaching assistant at the signal processing laboratory at EPFL from 1974 to 1979; as a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories (USA) from 1979 to 1983; and as a system engineer at Tricom (Berne) from 1983 to 1984. Since becoming a faculty member in 1984, he has also served as a consultant for AT&T Bell Laboratories and Nokia, been an invited researcher at the University of California—Santa Barbara, and been an invited professor at the College of Engineering in Bergen, Norway. He has published 30 papers and been awarded 2 patents. His areas of interest are signal and image processing, telecommunications principles and systems, and image compression. His most recent research is on the retrieval of sound from phonograph records using image processing [http://www.eif.ch/visualaudio]