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ABO aims to out-compress JPEG

Tags:
ABO,
Adaptive Binary Optimization,
File Compression

John Lui CNETAsia

Published: 28 Nov 2003 10:25 GMT

A Singapore company claims to have developed a technique of compressing files far smaller than what conventional methods can achieve and what's more, to do it without losing information.

The method, dubbed Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO), can help hospitals compress and manage medical images, aid film distributors archive and transmit movies and even make faxes and scans smaller for faster travel across networks, claim its makers.

Compression methods such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) for images and MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) for video have become de facto standards in IT, so the makers of ABO have decided to market their product as a complete content management platform.

The year-old firm, MatrixView, is working on a pilot project with the KK Women's and Children's Hospital in Singapore to digitise and store its videotape library of ultrasound images. These are images of fetuses inside the womb, taken with an ultrasound scanner.

Arvind Thiagarajan, the firm's founder and chief technology officer, said that ABO can achieve compression rates far higher than commonly used methods, such as JPEG.

"With JPEG and JPEG2000 the compression ratio is six to seven times, with a lot of errors. With lossless JPEG the ratio is four to five times," he said.

But with ABO, he said a compression ratio as high as 32 times can be gained for image files.

According to the company, ABO works by using a variety of techniques, including dividing a file into groups with similar characteristics, such as the colours that make up an image file.

There is much less mathematical reformulation of the file as compared with methods such as wavelet compression, used in JPEG2000. Therefore, compression and decompression is quicker and the images are more true to the original, according to a statement from the firm.

Users can select compression ratios that range from mathematically lossless, for files that are byte-identical to the original, to higher ratios, for files that are visually identical with the original, but with visually unimportant data discarded.

It hasn't been easy wooing customers over to the new platform, especially one that breaks with established standards, acknowledged Ravindran Govindan, the firm's chairman.

"A paradigm shift takes a long time to achieve. The biggest challenge is in the movie and entertainment industry. It's a big area," he said.

But it's an industry that has potential for the young company with a tool for reducing video file sizes and the means to manage the content, he said.

Digitised, high-resolution films can be measured in terabytes, and the business is looking for ways to manage and broadcast the files with greater efficiency than current methods allow, said Govindan.

To ease fears of those who do not want to be locked down to a proprietary codec (compression-decompression format), the company plans to license the technology as plug-ins for other document, image and audio-video editing programs, such as page layout applications and Web browsers, he said.