The technology behind Chromaturf
A deep dive into the adaptive contrast correction, region detection, and temporal smoothing that power real-time broadcast enhancement.
Adaptive Contrast Enhancement
Traditional broadcast processing applies a single tone curve across the entire frame. When half the pitch sits in deep shadow and the other half is sunlit, this is a losing game — lift the shadows and you blow the highlights, or protect the highlights and lose the shadow detail entirely.
Chromaturf divides each frame into a spatial grid and computes independent tone-mapping parameters per cell. Shadow regions receive localised lift while highlight regions are gently compressed, then the boundaries are smoothly blended to prevent visible seams. The result is a frame where both halves of the pitch appear naturally lit — without the telltale halo artefacts of naive HDR processing.
Region-of-Interest Detection
Not all pixels matter equally. Chromaturf’s detection pipeline identifies the pitch surface, player silhouettes, and the ball in real time — prioritising correction quality in the areas viewers are actually watching. Advertising boards, crowd sections, and sky are handled with lighter processing to save compute budget where it counts.
The detection model runs on a lightweight neural network optimised for inference speed, trained on thousands of hours of broadcast footage across stadiums, weather conditions, and camera angles.
Temporal Smoothing
Live footage isn’t a series of independent images — it’s a continuous signal. If correction parameters shift abruptly between frames, the viewer sees flickering or pulsing that’s more distracting than the original shadow problem.
Chromaturf maintains a rolling state across frames, damping correction changes with configurable time constants. When a cloud passes and the shadow boundary shifts, the correction adapts gradually — matching the natural speed of the lighting change rather than snapping to the new state.
Colour Normalisation
Sunlight and shade don’t just differ in brightness — they differ in colour temperature. The sunlit half of a pitch appears warm and vivid while the shaded half skews cool and desaturated. Chromaturf applies per-region white balance correction that brings both zones into alignment, so grass looks like the same shade of green across the entire frame.
Built for the broadcast pipeline
End-to-end latency
Maximum throughput
Input/output formats
Rack unit footprint