Silicon Valley-based Pulsent Corporation has announced a radical new approach to video compression. This claims to finally break the technical and practical barriers to delivering true broadcast quality video over broadband networks.

Pulsent's technology provides a 400 per cent improvement in bandwidth and storage efficiency over existing block-based video compression schemes like MPEG-2, an official release states. For the first time service providers can deliver full-screen, broadcast-quality video into the home at 1.1 Mbps - with the same clarity and resolution that television viewers expect.

The market impact of Pulsent's technology includes delivery of broadcast video services over ADSL, quadrupling the amount of programming that can be stored on personal video recorders (PVRs), dramatically increasing cable or satellite channel capacity. It also covers delivering on the promise of video-on-demand (VoD) and high-definition television (HDTV) in the near future the release states.

Speaking on this CEO Pulsent Adityo Prakash said: "Today's approaches to video compression have run out of gas. 20+ year-old block-based technologies like MPEG and its proprietary offshoots just can't be improved significantly. The industry has long needed a fundamental rethinking of how video is processed and delivered to enable the next generation of services and applications. That is what we've achieved."

The accomplishment required the Pulsent team to re-address almost every aspect of video processing the release states. Pulsent's innovative approach to video compression side-steps the constraints of block-based methods by processing video images in a fundamentally different way. Pulsent's technology identifies the true structural elements ("objects") in any video scene and efficiently models their motion.

Pulsent's "objects" are the natural, elastic constituent components of any image and they directly correspond to parts of real-world objects. Once identified, the frame-to-frame motion of these "objects" can be far more accurately modeled than with block-based approaches. Pulsent claims to have developed numerous patent-pending techniques for detecting and representing object movements and changes such as size modifications, rotations, occlusions, lighting changes and fades. Pulsent's highly accurate frame-to-frame modelling results in a 400 percent improvement in video compression efficiency over MPEG-2, enabling broadcast quality video at 1.1 Mbps.

Pulsent claims that its video payloads are designed for compatible transmission through standard MPEG Transport Stream protocols. Thus, Pulsent video can be delivered through existing network and satellite infrastructures currently supporting MPEG video streams. Pulsent Corporation claims to be spearheading the next generation of digital video processing and transmission with its innovative algorithms, software and hardware technologies for efficient storage and delivery of digital video.

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