As more and more service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers add video to their communications offerings—particularly mobile video—they soon discover that Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for video is a lot more complicated and problematic than for audio.

 

Fortunately, Ipera Technology has come to rescue with its Pixel Magic technology, a family of flexible, software-based solutions that dramatically improves an end-user’s visual experience with any portable (or other) device. Ipera’s solutions can run on processors at speeds less than 100 MHz with a code size of less than 100 Kilobytes. In typical SOC (Syste on a chip) applications, the software consumes less than 150 milliWatts of power and is implemented with 150K gates.

 

Ipera’s Pixel Magic solutions work in such video codec formats as H.264, VC1, DivX, MPEG-1/2/4, H.263, raw video or any future format, as well as any video applications in online video, PC, PMP, cellphones and professional video systems. They can be applied to broadcast, telco, cable, fixed-wireless and satellite direct-to-home (DTH) environments.

 

Ipera’s Pixel Magic SE is an X-86 CPU-based solution that improves the output of streaming servers received at IPTV set-top boxes. Pixel Magic CE is a related family of solutions based on ARM (News - Alert) and other embedded CPUs, designed to run on cellphones and portable devices that are powered by CPUs running as slowly as 60 MHz.

 

The Pixel Magic family does all sorts of “massaging” of visual data. It can reduce artifacts from compressed video, and thus can de-block, de-ring and de-mosquito the image. (Ringing is an artifact usually associated with resampling algorithms for both video and audio, though a similar phenomenon can also occur as a consequence of frequency-based filtering, particularly steep low/high bandpassing and notch filtering. Mosquito noise is generally caused as an artifact of JPEG compression, and can appear in video as a result of similar discrete cosine transform (DCT) block compression.)

 

Pixel Magic solves scaling and de-interlacing issues. It can de-interlace an image with motion compensation, and it can do scaling and rate conversion. The solution’s effects include contrast and brightness enhancement, skin tone and color enhancement and correction, edge and detail enhancement, 3D noise reduction, and video signal boosting tailored specifically for LCD displays.

 

Pixel Magic should be a hit with vendors of portable devices where low power consumption is critical.