MotionDSP uses military grade video enhancement technology to improve the quality of low-grade footage from devices like mobile phones. The technology compares every frame in a video to find and replace missing pixels. We profiled the company in August and today they have launched their first product. Called Ikena, the offering is a B2B deal aimed at websites hosting consumer generated video content. The company offered a brief period of free public beta use, but that period is over now.
If you start seeing the quality of mobile shot video on the web improving, don’t assume it’s an improvement on the phone side. MostionDSP’s resolution enhancement could become an industry standard for video sharing sites. You can see the quality of the video enhancement on the company’s sample page or on the MotionDSP user page on YouTube. The difference isn’t huge, but when consumers had a choice between the two I think the demand will be clear.
MotionDSP began in 1998 as a US military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. Its first product provides real time enhancement (meaning a one-minute video will take one minute to enhance) using a system of 3 dual core servers. Those systems start at $30,000 but most large companies will want to buy them in bulk.
A company representative told me that future products could include chips to perform the resolution enhancement on phones or laptops. Anything that can run its algorithm is a potential platform, they said. They have taken about $500,000 in angel funding and are expecting to close Series A funding before end of year, probably in November.
Why can’t this just be built into the video cams.
Because it requires 3 Dual Core processors. Get it?
Aren’t we moving to a High-Definition era?
This is pretty impressive. I think that Google Earth/Maps as well as MSN Maps/Live Local could have some use for this technology since resolution is lost as you zoom in to particular areas using the satellite views.
overcast, but isn’t that just for post processing. what’s going to happen to their business when the video cams gets to use advanced chipsets that offer high quality. my question is more of how sustainable is their b2b model?
When mobile phones start recording HD quality video, you come talk to me.
Well, we can talk right now with all the 2 megapixel – 10 megapixel cam equipped mobiles hitting the market today. That should be good enough for amateur videography. Sure..may be their technology was more appropriate in 1998 when MotionDSP started its research.
Very few post programs can substitute the impact that a good sensor has. That’s a problem we see with a lot of the tiny digital cameras that pack 10MP and try to fix the crappy sensor’s picture with post software.
On the digital front, more and more HD handhelds are coming out and they sacrifice sensor quality for the HD mark. For the best quality, nothing beats a good set of sensors and using basic lighting techniques.
Here’s a quick video we made for our webiste using a 3-sensor DV camera and final cut: http://www.conv...irst-video.html
Their demos look like a Super Eagle AA or HQ3x algorithm. IMHO it’s not at all likely these kind of enchancements will improve far beyond the quality we see today. They are very limited techniques. Some webcams have this built in but at the expense of frames per second. To me, it’s not worth it.
If a technique can give a _major_ improvement like DivX;-) did for video, it’s very exciting. This isn’t one of those achievements.
The future of the web is web video. Companies will have to make their sites and videos Mobile enable if companies want to reach a wider audience.
If you ever really captured video on cell phone, you would know how bad it is. HD camera on a cell phone — good luck waiting for it.
Mobile photo resolution might get better, but video has different limitations. Small form factor, cheap lenses, low quality real-time encoder, high compression rates, and small upload bandwidth won’t be improved that soon. Any amount of smart video reconstruction on the decoding/display side should be welcomed.
Anyone else thing this has major applications in the crime investigation areas where cell phones have captured video?
~Cody
http://www.threadbound.com
This rocks! It would be cool to see this applied to all crappy youtube videos!
How can I test motiondsp in my videos?Thanks!!!
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