To concentrate on digital still video

As we keep pointing out, digital image compression is the key that will unlock a host of applications: from digital still video to digital television, interactive multimedia, picture phones and video teleconferencing — the list is as long as your imagination. At the moment, the leaders in image compression hardware and software are virtually all American. Except for Intel, they are mostly small Silicon Valley firms: Compression Laboratories, C-Cube Microsystems, Storm Technologies, Zoran, etc.

These companies are forming relationships and alliances with larger companies who will drive products into the business and consumer markets. The alliances they make are based in part on their estimates of what products and technologies will drive the market, and in part on whom they are able to make deals with.

Thus, Compression Laboratories will supply the compression/decompression technology for the SkyPix direct broadcast satellite venture. C-Cube has signed deals with JVC and Philips for chips to be used to decode compressed motion video stored on interactive CD-ROM.

Zoran, a developer of application-specific VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration) image processors, has recently formed an alliance with Fuji Photo Film to develop image compression/decompression technology for digital video applications.

Digital still video. All of the still video cameras in the market are based on the analog technology originally used in the Sony Mavica. A video field (every other scan line) or video frame (a full set of 480 scan lines) is recorded as an analog signal onto a small magnetic disk. The disk reader samples the analog signal and coverts it into digital form for use in computer applications.

At the giant PhotoKina show last fall, Fuji showed a prototype of a digital still-video camera that captures the image, digitizes it, compresses the digital information and records it onto static ram contained in a removable credit card-sized card. The image resolution is exceptionally high for video: 768 pixels per scan line — not quite twice the resolution of a laser disk or S-VHS tape. An 8-megabyte card holds 5, 10 or 20 images (at 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16 compression respectively.) Production versions will hold 36 images at 1/24 compression.

The chip technology that performs this compression (as well as the decompression in the reader box that interfaces to your television set or computer) was developed jointly by Fuji and Zoran. It makes use of “JPEG-like” discrete cosine transform algorithms.

The future of still video. We have long been intrigued with still video. The systems we have had in our office have been remarkably popular with all of our staff members, not just the techno-junkies. The ability to point a camera at an image, capture it, then read it into your computer is very seductive. Bear in mind, however, that these were people who had access to relatively powerful computers, color monitors, and image processing software that let them perform creative image manipulations and include images in a variety of documents. You do not have these capabilities on your home television set.

The Japanese manufacturers have conceived of still video as a consumer hobbyist technology that must be tied to existing TV sets. The greatest interest in the U.S. market has been in still video as a means of capturing images to be fed into a computer and/or transmitted over the phone network. The most obvious applications are publishing related (newspapers, technical documentation, real estate directories, etc.), archival (insurance or medical records) or database related (employee directories, etc.). The biggest limitation for most of these applications has been image quality. If your object is computer input, there is no need to limit yourself to video resolution — especially since you want considerably better-than-video quality for most print applications.

The Fuji/Zoran announcement suggests that the Fuji digital still video cameras and readers will come to market. We hope that the image quality will be sufficient for the applications that could really make use of this technology.

- Jonathan Seybold