What They Say
Image technology specialist, Beamr, posted a blog claiming that it has now got 50 granted patents. It’s first business was in optimising images for more efficient compression while maintaining the subjective quality. The company explained:
“Our first patent applications covered the components of the quality measure itself, and its usage in a system for “recompressing” images or video frames. The system takes a source image or a video frame, compresses it at various compression levels, and then compares the compressed versions to the source. Finally, it selects the compressed version that is smallest in file size, but still retains the full quality of the source, as measured by our quality metric”.
The firm said that as the blog post went to press, it was awarded its 51st patent which covers a method of “crowdsourcing” subjective user opinions on video quality, and aggregating the results to obtain meaningful metrics. There’s a video about it here.
What We Think
I have to admit that although we mentioned Beamr’s technology from 2013 onwards (it was founded in 2009), I found their claims sounded too good to be true so was very sceptical. However, eventually the firm developed quite a ‘blue chip’ list of companies that adopted it and that gave me confidence to take their claims more seriously. (BR)
