Wednesday, November 16, 2005

honey, i shrunk the jpeg

Finally, JPEG is doomed, algorithm geeks unite! This is the quantum leap, no compromise technology. Young genius about to rock the DI world.

By Shailaja Neelakantan, September 21, 2005 BUSINESS 2.0

If downloading digital photos stalls your PC, spare a thought for the data networks in hospitals. A midsize hospital typically gets 60 requests every hour for MRIs and echocardiograms. At 10 megabytes apiece, the enormous images can quickly cripple a network.

Enter 25-year-old Arvind Thiagarajan, co-founder of Singapore-based startup MatrixView, who wants to revolutionize digital imaging. The data-compression algorithm he invented shrinks images into a format called a MatrixView Universal, or MVU, which is 15 to 300 percent smaller than a JPEG. But unlike a JPEG, which omits details, an MVU is as precise as the original. "Data loss is unacceptable in medical diagnosis," Thiagarajan says. That's why the startup is focusing on health care first. A well-known hospital in Bangalore is using the technology, and MatrixView plans to ink deals in the coming year with several Fortune 100 health-care companies in the United States. MatrixView is also targeting other subsets of the $9 billion U.S. digital-imaging market. Right now it's negotiating with chipmakers to embed the technology in cameras and fit more files on storage cards. MRIs today, vacation snaps tomorrow.

http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1106847,00.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sure the company holds to patent for the algorithm and is not going to allow royalty-free use. If that is the case, JPEGs are not going anywhere. At the least (even if the case against Forget is thrown out) JPEG patent expires in 2006.

Anonymous said...

ABO, or adaptive binary optimisation has two things going against it.

1. As the previous poster said, the company's business premise is 'Marketing ABO' and hence might not be widely acceptable.

2.Secondly the algorithm involved is not valid in all cases (though it rarely occours in practice, images with low local correlation cannot' be successfuly compresed with ABO).

The white paper is actually available from the company website which discusses the algorithm (RCC) behind this technology.

http://matrixview.com/files/ABO%20white%20paper.pdf