ETIENNE JULIEN - PORTFOLIO

From the start of my final year of Engineering school to January 2025, I worked on a new project with a team of four audiovisual students. Each student had an industry-based group project during this period, designed to prepare us for a career as engineers working in project teams. The subject of my group was the implementation of a test and broadcast platform for 360° immersive video formats.

The work carried out in this project was as follows: we started with a bibliographical study of the various acquisition tools and immersive headsets available, as well as an introduction to the various editing methods. The aim of the project was, at the very least, to set up a complete, functional acquisition and processing chain linked to immersive formats, and ideally to study the performance of this chain when the acquired content contained coding or transmission artifacts.

We organized our state of the art into four parts:

• An overview of the different stages in the broadcast chain
• An overview of existing solutions (encoding, 2D mapping, camera, platform, etc.)
• Study of the various metrics available specifically for 360° video
• awareness of limitations at all stages of the broadcast chain

In a second phase, we built up a 360° video database with varied content of differing spatio-temporal complexity, potentially stressful for existing coding tools, which could be made available to the scientific community for use in their tests.

Finaly, We also created a prototype of a 360° camera. It was entirely prototyped and designed by us. We also had to develop a Python stitching algorithm adapted to our prototype and modify our transmission chain to be able to retrieve a high-quality video stream.

Our camera will continue to evolve in the coming years. Therefore, we prepared documentation to enable future engineering students to work on it without having to rediscover the problems we encountered during the design phase.

During this project, we were supervised by professors and had to produce regular presentations and deliverables to ensure continuous monitoring of our progress. At the end of our project, we must deliver several deliverables, including a presentation summarizing the last six months of work.