First Look:

Euclid achieves 400-600% boost in mobile video delivery

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(03/29/06, 6:54 AM GMT)

Concord, Mass. – Euclid Discoveries claims it has achieved compression ratios of 15,168 to 1 for certain videos, paving the way for high quality streaming video delivery over wireless networks in applications such as mobile phones, PDAs, and portable media players.

Called EuclidVision, the technology greatly exceeds the current standard for digital video with a 460 percent improvement over MPEG-4, and more than a 600 percent improvement over DVD video format MPEG-2 for certain videos.

According to Richard Wingard, CEO of Euclid Discoveries, EuclidVision paves the way for applications like video conferencing on mobile phones, and streaming live, high-quality video to portable devices like PDAs.

"Because we're building off the existing MPEG-4 standard extensions, we have video compression technology that will eventually work with the hardware and software that is available now," he said. "Bandwidth limitations have stifled the promise of wireless digital video for years. By providing an order of magnitude increase, we just solved that problem."

Wingard said EuclidVision uses a new generation of video compression known as "Object-Based Compression" or "OBC," which refers to technology that analyzes shapes in the video to achieve higher compression ratios. This is a major

departure from other compression technologies, including MPEG-4, which are based on "Discrete Cosine Transform" or "DCT."

The architects of MPEG-4 technology envisioned OBC as the future for this video standard but, before Euclid Discoveries, no one has managed to make it work in a commercial setting.

The MPEG-4 standard anticipates object-based compression through "Object Planes," facial modeling, and 3D object modeling -- providing only a definition of these concepts without providing the means of employing them toward the goal of high compression ratios.

"While this is a revolutionary concept for the general public, the video industry saw this coming," said Euclid Discoveries President Bob Werner. "Still, no one thought it would be coming so soon. Many thought this level of mathematical modeling would have taken another ten years to develop."

Myraid mobile, consumer applications

EuclidVision testing has focused on what the firm calls "streaming commentator" applications. This is video that shows the head and shoulders of the subject, which makes the current generation of the technology optimized for video conferencing applications, or simple newscasts.

For streaming commentator video, Wingard said Euclid enginners have been able to  reduce a 23 MB video file to a 1,519 byte file – effectively enabling sub-4Kbps, low-bandwidth streams for wired and wireless applications. The streaming commentator application provides a rigorous proving ground for EuclidVision.

In the coming months, he said Euclid Discoveries expects to complete tests demonstrating its ability to process all video types including full-length movies, and at increased compression rates. Ultimately, said Wingard, it should be possible to reduce the current MPEG-4 attainable 700 MB file size for 2-hour long videos down to 50MB -- finally making feature length movies as "swappable" as MP3s.

"The potential of object-based technology is so great that it seems counterintuitive to what most people know about compression," said Euclid Discoveries' Chief Software Architect Chuck Pace. "By bringing computer vision algorithms into the video compression world we've taken this first, momentous leap, and anticipate even larger reductions in video file sizes are soon to follow."

Head-to-head with MPEG-4

According to Pace, the company validated the technology by making a head-to-head comparison between EuclidVision and MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC (a.k.a. H.264) -- the state-of-the-art for video conferencing -- on a network with 9 kilobits per second of bandwidth. This bandwidth-constrained network simulates what people could get from a typical mobile phone connection.

Euclid Discoveries started with a baseline test to show that it could achieve similar digital output to MPEG-4 in this bandwidth environment. Then it lowered the bandwidth to 4 kilobits per second, resulting in a total breakdown of the MPEG-4 output, but a clear, recognizable video using EuclidVision.

EuclidVision compressed a 23mb 30fps reference video down to 1,519 bytes (15,168:1 compression ratio, 3.56 Kbps bandwidth). MPEG-4 H.264 compressed the same video at similar quality to 8,518 bytes (2,705:1 compression ratio, 19.96 Kbps). Given that MPEG-4 is 50% more efficient than MPEG-2, the 5.6 times improvement over MPEG-4 represents an implied 740% improvement over MPEG-2.

"We're producing visually meaningful video clips in a bandwidth constrained environment going down as low as 1.6 kilobit per second,” said Jeff Roberts, Technical Product Manager for Euclid Discoveries. “This makes many of the bandwidth constraints for digital video moot.

"We basically wanted to see how low we could go; we quickly realized that no one gets close to us in terms of operating in a low-bandwidth environment."

How It Works

EuclidVision's technology is object-based. In simple terms, EuclidVision recognizes objects in the video, like a face, and applies new compression techniques to those objects differing from the background. Current video compression using Discrete Cosine Transform does not look at objects, it just applies a constant rate of compression to the entire frame or picture.

As the company’s compression algorithms become more sophisticated, said Pace, “it will be able to identify more and smaller objects, allowing for higher rates of compression.” Already, he said, EuclidVision has achieved compression ratios of up to 38,000 to one in a test setting.

"EuclidVision represents 'new math' in the video compression space," said Euclid Discoveries' Werner. "It took 15 years to move from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, which represents a 50% improvement. In a faction of that time, we've gone from 50% to 460%."

Patent Protection

As of December 2005, Euclid Discoveries filed 15 patent filings covering "Apparatus and Method for Processing Video Data." The patents stake the Euclid Discoveries' claim to key enabling discoveries in computer vision and image understanding.

"Our U.S. and international patent is the insurance policy covering Euclid Discoveries' intellectual property, the key assets of the firm," said Euclid

Discoveries' Wingard. "These protections provide a major barrier to entry for companies looking to move into this area of compression, allowing us to effectively own this space."

EuclidVision is a proprietary technology, said Wingard, which will increase video compression ratios by an order of magnitude – reducing file size dramatically and removing existing bandwidth constraints for the transmission of high quality video.

Beyond the obvious commercial applications in wirelessly connected mobile and portable media player applications, he said, the technology has clear potential applications in a host of industries beyond consumer electronics and

telecommunications including surveillance, and image mining. Euclid Discoveries has also developed a rigorous testing environment, EuclidStudio, to evaluate video compression and quality for MPEG-4 and other compression technologies.

To learn more, go to www.eucliddiscoveries.com.  

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