Media Communications
For more than twenty years, FastVDO has developed state-of-the-art technologies in multimedia communications. Whether it is voice, audio, image, or video, FastVDO has created world-leading technologies that facilitate how media is stored and transmitted, increasing both efficiency and quality. We simply live and breathe signal processing, making it faster, easier, and smoother. Which in the end enhances the user experience, while reducing the cost of devices and services. Today, FastVDO technologies are in common use in mobile phones, broadcast and satellite television, DVDs and blu-ray disks. And without knowing it, users around the world benefit every day from advances first pioneered by FastVDO. That is because FastVDO has quietly helped in the development of the world's most commonly used video codecs, such as the ITU series H.264, H.265, and H.266 standards (ISO/IEC AVC, HEVC, and VVC standards, respectively). Moreover, and fundamentally, the communications of video over lossy wireless channels requires serious error protection, another advanced technology in our arsenal. But consumers don't care about technologies, only about the experience. And that is just what FastVDO is focused on as well. In fact, FastVDO will soon release a comprehensive Video Transmission Toolkit (FV-VTT) that allows a systematic simulation of video encoders, FECs, transmission channels, and assess the quality of received videos. This toolkit encompasses the above video standards, plus AV1; and the latest FECs such as Polar, LDPC, and Turbo codes (as used in various standards such as Wifi and 3GPP standards, especially 5G), and channel models including AWGN, Rayleigh fading, burst error channels, and other models. Stay tuned!
Advanced Compression And High Dynamic Range (HDR) Video Coding
Video in our world is now all around us. We watch video on many devices, video chat across a room or the planet, and capture video with all our gadgets: smartphones, tablets, laptops, as well as cameras. That video can be HD, or even 4K. Picture resolution has increased by leaps and bounds in just the past decade. While 1080p is the most used resolution today for high quality broadcast and streaming, 4K is clearly the next step, with 8K on its heels (in fact there are smartphones that already capture 8K video). As an industry, we are transitioning from 1080p to 4K now. Due to 4X the data of 4K over 1080p, this requires powerful compression to fit existing transmission channels. But the next big revolution in video is not just more pixels, but better pixels. Welcome to the world of high dynamic range (HDR), where pictures can be as bright as daylight, or as dark as night. And colors can be as vibrant as our eyes can see. And in the end, this helps the viewer to feel immersed in the scene, enriching the experience. FastVDO is working in the international standards committees to help bring this technology to a living room near you. Example clips of drone acquired 4K HDR videos can be found on our site here.
Video Quality Analysis and Video Usability
The worldwide video services industry is now a massive $200B/yr industry, encompassing broadcast, streaming, and other video communications. The quality of the video served is of paramount importance for entertainment, and engagement. For more than 30 years, a simple, mean-squared error based metric, called PSNR, was the primary tool for analyzing the quality of video by the video coding research sector, despite a slew of quality analysis tools proposed by academic researchers. Now, using technology partly motivated by recent work in the VMAF video quality measure by Netflix, FastVDO has advanced the state of the art using feature extraction and AI technology to achieve up to a stunning 98% correlation with human rated scores, according to the widely regarded Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (SRCC) measure. This same technology also plays a critical part in measuring the usability for a video segment for exploitation purposes in surveillance applications. Check out our latest publication on Arxiv, here.
Augmented Reality and Multi-Sensor Vision
We have entered a new age, in which media can be transformative, augmenting our visual reality with virtual objects and interfaces. Augmented Reality (AR) is a facinating technology that can enhance our experience, as well as greatly improve productivity in industrial applications. This technology, employing an AR headset, fundamentally uses multi-sensor processing to understand its environment in 3D, as well as localize itself within the 3D space. A modern AR headset, such as Microsoft Hololens 2, employs four grayscale video sensors, an RGB video sensor, as well as a depth sensor. FastVDO is a Microsoft Hololens 2 Development Partner. Moreover, the sensor suite on such an AR headset is comparable that employed in modern autonomous vehicles, which have both video sensors, as well as depth sensors such as Lidar. Thus, multi-sensor processing schemes such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), as well as Stereo Object Detection, are commonly used in both AR and autonomous vehicles.
Human Computer Interfaces
Beyond multimedia communications, FastVDO is engaged in cutting-edge research in the way we interact with computer systems as well, with innovative human computer interfaces. For decades, the keyboard and mouse were the only way to interact with computers, making it a chore for many people. Then came the touchscreen, which revolutionized computing, and launched the smartphone and tablet era. Now, we are at the final frontier. natural, touchless interaction, by gestures. FastVDO is among an elite set of companies working on what we call a visual language for human computer interfaces. By simply moving and shaping our hands, faces, and bodies into gestures, we can make our computer systems do what we want. It is almost like magic.. a wave of the hand, and voila, a presentation advances, an in-game racecar turns, or a map zooms in on a location. It may sound like science fiction, but this technology is just at the threshold of becoming mainstream. And you can bet FastVDO will be there to make it happen.
