NVIDIA CUDA Used to Recover Apollo 11 Moon Video
When NASA’s original Apollo 11 moon landing video was accidentally destroyed, it seemed the world had lost a visual record of one of man’s greatest achievements. Fortunately, unique digital video restoration technology from Lowry Digital, powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) with CUDA technology, has enhanced television coverage of the original video so that we can now watch Neil Armstrong take a giant leap for mankind in high-definition (HD).
Lowry Digital worked with several video sources to produce the footage, working from low-quality images such as television broadcast video and 8mm film shot on a handheld camera that was pointed at the monitor at NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in Australia. The newly released Apollo 11 video was enhanced by removing artifacts like noise, flickering, darkened image corners, blurs and smears, enabling it to regain proper contrast and improved resolution. Enhancing each frame of the video on a CPU-only system would have taken Lowry Digital between 20 to 45 minutes to complete. Tesla GPUs deliver a 100-times boost in performance, cutting the restoration time for a single frame to seconds. The final Apollo 11 video will feature two and half hours of HD video.
Comments are closed.