Faster Image Processing on Camera Phones

The imaging software firm, Scalado says that the latest version of CAPS, its imaging software for camera-phones, is already offering benefits normally highlighted as advantages of JPEG2000, the highly publicised next-generation image format based on wavelet compression. CAPS, however, has managed to overcome the interoperability problems, lack of standardisation, and the content protection issues that have so far undermined the widespread adoption of JPEG2000.

"Phone manufacturers understand the value of using powerful image processing technology, since it allows their end-users to work with high-resolution images quickly and easily," says Mats Jacobson, CEO, Scalado. "Although JPEG2000 is being touted as the future standard for full-frame image compression, its adoption remains slow and problematic. However, we can now provide some of the key JPEG2000 benefits on standard JPEG images - such as 'Region of Interest', 'Lossless features' and reduced need for processing power, instead of waiting for the adoption of the new JPEG standard."

RAJPEG technology can encode/decode JPEG images whilst reducing memory requirements significantly by processing JPEG input and output images in the compressed domain. This innovative approach to data compression enables viewing of any region of a JPEG image without needing to access the previous parts of the image.

As such, RAJPEG reduces the amount of memory required by up to 25 times, and increases speed for image manipulation by up to 10 times. Parts of mega-pixel images in any scale can be opened, and zoomed into any details consuming only fractions of CPU and memory compared to traditional JPEG decoders. Better still, all operations can be performed in real-time on the phone's display.

For example, to crop an area of 320x240 from a 3 Mega Pixel JPEG image and save it, Scalado's solution will only use 700kB of memory, compared with the 6MB required using traditional methods. Likewise, the process will take less than 1 second to complete, compared with almost 10 seconds required by most existing software technologies. In addition to this improved compression performance, Scalado's CAPS platform also offers more sophisticated image scaling and editing features.

The software runs on any handset operating system supporting ANSI-C."

Posted to the site on 20th September 2006