[opendtv] Microsoft beats JPEG with new photo format for Vista
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 14:28:18 -0400
Microsoft beats JPEG with new photo format for Vista
Rick Merritt
(05/24/2006 3:37 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=3D188103092
SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. unveiled a new photo format it claims will
provide better quality at half the size of a JPEG image. Windows Media
Photo (WMP) will be built into the next-generation of Windows, called
Vista.
"One of the biggest drivers for upgrading computers is digital
photography, so anything we do to make digital photography better is
good for Windows," said Bill Crow, senior program manager for WMP. Crow
presented the technology publicly for the first time at the Windows
Hardware Engineering Conference here Wednesday (May 24).
Microsoft has been working on the photo format with unnamed partners,
including camera makers, for nearly four years. "It's been very much
driven by their feedback," said Crow.
Windows Media Photo takes a significantly new approach to the same basic
discrete cosine transform technology used in JPEG. Crow described the
algorithm as a bi-orthoginal lapped transform based on published work
from Microsoft Research. The format also includes a fresh approach to
areas such as color space and color conversion.
"It's really a new approach, and a whole collection of innovations,"
said Crow. "Some of the same engineers who worked on the Windows Media
Video codec VC-9 also worked on Windows Media Photo. All the lessons
they learned from VC-9 but weren't able to change because of the
schedule, they applied here," he added.
WMP captures more of the raw information of photos to enable better
presentation, editing and compression. Crow said WMP will easily enable
25:1 compression ratios for most uses of digital photography. That
compares to a maximum of about 12:1 for consumer JPEG images before
images visibly degrade.
WMP is based on a symmetrical algorithm that supports both lossless and
lossy compression. It requires no complex math or special hardware
support, and is based primarily on add and shift operations with few
multiplies in its inner loops. Memory requirements are also minimal, in
part because the algorithm supports encoding and decoding imagines in
stripes that only need small buffers.
To preserve compatibility with existing systems, the WMP format uses the
existing TIFF "container" including its approach to metadata. The choice
of TIFF however limits file sizes to 4 gigabytes, a limit Microsoft will
address for high-end users in the future. Microsoft will also release
tools to support WMP on existing Windows XP systems.
Microsoft released to a broad group of licensed development partners a
developers kit that includes source code for WMP. The kit will let chip
and system makers build support for WMP in their products.
Crow would not say whether camera, printer or chip makers will release
products supporting WMP when Vista is launched. In a sign of how quiet
Microsoft has kept the effort, some chip makers at the presentation were
not even sure whether they had been informed about the technology.
All material on this site Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights
reserved.
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