Core Services

Attrahent uses a new, powerful programming-language which enables it to develop systems extremely quickly and effectively. The company also designs database and client-specific database management-systems.

Attrahent contracts and consults to industry on various engineering and technical projects, including product development, electronics, signal processing, telecommunications, research, and much more.

Additional Consultation Services

Our skills base has produced systems for uniquely identifying individual advertisements by audio (e.g. radio advertisements). This allows an advertiser to determine whether a radio station is broadcasting advertisements as per the agreed schedule.

The system is in 24h operation in South Africa, continuously monitoring a variety of local radio stations. It has on a number of occasions detected cases where client advertisements were not broadcast as agreed. In some of these cases, DJs had even signed the playing log and insisted the ads were played. Subsequent examination of the broadcast archive tapes, however, demonstrated that this was not the case!

Our skills base has developed watermarking technology for embedding unique codes into audio streams. One application of this system is in identifying individual radio advertisements, another is in identifying individual songs.

Our skills base has extensive expertise in technologies such as FPGAs which have been applied in many diverse projects, such as satellite subsystem design for telecommunications, enterprise photocopy management systems, access control systems, PABX control systems, and many more.

Our skills base has extensive experience in a multitude of digital signal processing applications. These include image processing, pattern recognition, audio processing and many more. Examples include development of DSP techniques for analogue terrestrial pay-TV broadcasters, which uses digital instead of analogue techniques to perform the analogue signal scrambling and encoding. Other examples include advertisement recognition systems, endless audio recorders, analysis of grinder sounds to optimize ore grinding, image analysis of platinum baths to optimize platinum extraction, and many more.

We have developed a unique cost-effective e-commerce platform. The aim is to enable research- and project teams based at Stellenbosch University and elsewhere, to use e-commerce to provide their commercial outputs to the broader public. These products include software (e.g. for thinking skills and accelerated learning), CD albums from our campus record labels, market reports, photographs from the campus archives, etc.

Our skills base has assisted in solving numerous EMC/EMI issues, from the sophisticated to the mundane (including debugging interference in cinema digital sound installations).

Drawing on its extensive experience in pattern recognition, our skills base has developed various systems for verifying handwritten signatures, including dynamically as the signature is made, and statically from an image of a signature. These systems are a subset of biometric systems, and also includes technologies such as speaker verification, iris recognition, etc. Our skills base is uniquely positioned to roll out integrated combinations of such technologies, based on an extensive pattern recognition platform developed at Stellenbosch University.

Our skills base has developed various systems, including sub-bottom profiling sonar, which has on occasion been used by marine companies to locate "misplaced" pipelines on the ocean floor.

Another example is an innovative miniature sonar device for automatically opening a parachute at the correct height, for example when dropping parachuted containers containing food-for-aid.

Our skills base has been involved with numerous research and development projects related to mobile telephony; including development of a barcode / RFID scanner plug-in for Ericsson GSM handsets, delivery of reconfigurable menus via SMS, Bluetooth, codec analysis, etc.

Our technical skills base has assisted in the drafting of patent specifications and other legal documentation. We have found that patent lawyers frequently have an insufficient understanding of a technology in order to provide as watertight a service as possible – instead one needs technical experts who have immersed themselves in a technology and understand its potential. We are able to assist with such issues.

Our skills base has extensive expertise in pattern recognition, as applied to the diverse spectrum of signal processing, speech and image processing. For example, systems have been provided to read vehicle license plates.

Our skills base has built a software platform which integrates a multitude of pattern recognition algorithms – this in turn allows for seamlessly integrated combinations of technology to be rolled out. For example, it is possible to seamlessly combine speech and handwriting recognition technology.

Our skills base has done a variety of work with RFID and barcoding technologies, including analysis of new tags, decoding methodologies, and interfacing of miniature barcode / RFID scanners to mobile GSM handsets.

Our skills base has provided services such as:

• researching the optimization of Internet delivery via satellite for Internet companies,
• analyzing and addressing security issues in satellite signalling, and
• implementing error-control coding for block erasures via satellite.

Our skills base has conducted and presented numerous short courses to industry and academia, including courses tailor-made to the requirements of specific clients. Examples include short courses in diverse areas such as: digital satellite TV, MPEG, micropatch antennas, EMC, DSP techniques, modulation systems, etc.

Our skills base has extensive experience in the research and development of software defined radio technologies. This allows the complex details of radio systems (such as modulation) to be specified in software. Technology that would traditionally be implemented with analogue devices (such as generating FM stereo signals) can now be done digitally under software control. This allows for easy reconfigurations of entire radio designs by simply altering software.

Our skills base is equipped with a vast array of software skills. These are not simply limited to basic applications, but are usually deployed in conjunction with advanced algorithms (such as pattern recognition, etc.) A short extract from our list of skills include: C++, C, Unix/Linux/SGI, Java, Python, CVS, SQL, Latex, HTML, php, SSL, Perl, Delphi, Matlab, hand-crafted SIMD assembler, and many more.

Our skills base has extensive expertise in speech processing and recognition. Having developed world-leading techniques for the training of higher-order HMMs, a software platform has been built which integrates these techniques with a multitude of other pattern recognition algorithms. This is leveraged for various purposes, including speaker verification and topic spotting.

Our skills base features experts in (among others) RSFQ and COSL, and includes one of the founders of COSL.

Our skills base has also produced a patented design for implementing a programmable gate array in superconducting logic. This promises to allow any VHDL/Verilog design (including any engineering simulation which could be expressed in VHDL/Verilog) to be executed at approximately 100GHz. The commercialization of this technology is being pursued in a separate company.