When you’ve peered deep into the heart of galaxies, tracked millions of stars by eye, mentally logged every detail and recorded them by hand it´s fair to say you know a thing or two about surveillance.

And in astrophysics, observation is the easy part. In 1983, accurately analysing such vast amounts of visual data took time, mind-bending statistical analysis and expensive computer modelling. Professor Bernard Jones decided there had to be a better way.

With support from the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Government, and working with his wife Dr Janet Jones, he developed Europe’s first 'frame grabber' or video capture board within just three years. And because funds were limited, he designed it to work with a new home computer called the PC.

Being an expert mathematician, Professor Jones then developed algorithms that enabled those painfully slow machines with limited memory to process images. In doing so, he not only created the world´s first 'paint' program but the basis of unique software that would eventually turn visual data into algorithms that a computer could 'understand'. And image compression software that could shrink footage to nearly half the size of an MPEG, with no loss of essential quality.

With negligible financial support but boundless conviction, the Jones´ continued to develop their software. By 1986, their technology had appeared on the BBC´s Tomorrow´s World, detecting when a single chocolate had been removed from a plateful. 10 years later, they had won a £1 million Home Office contract to supply alarm monitoring equipment to every high security prison in England.