Universal Compression and Communication System

The U.S. Army is seeking to leverage emerging civilian digital television technology to upgrade military imaging sensors. To meet Army needs, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) is developing a new Universal Video Compression (UVC) system, compatible withpresent and future DTV and compression standards. Integrated hardware and diversified software compression will also support wireless transmission of compressed video. With UVC object enhancement, a video scene is parsed into background, compressed atlower quality, and foreground objects, compressed at higher quality without compression artifacts. This saves bandwidth, because objects occupy relatively little of the video frame, and thus require fewer blocks for representation; compression efficiencyis proportional to the ratio of background area to the combined area of the objects. UVC integrates the existing MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG4, H.261, H.26L and wavelet video compression standards. Object enhancement is done in both the temporal andspatial domains. One means of object classification is POC's proprietary singularity mapping, based on catastrophe theory. POC expects to improve on state-of-the-art compression ratios by over an order of magnitude in Phase II, and to fabricatecompression/communication hardware that will be 2.5 in. x 4 in. x 1 in., weigh ~100 g, and draw 3 W.This Phase II project represents a breakthrough in innovative video compression technology. UVC will find applications in a variety of markets that requireoff-line or real-time video compression. These markets are video on demand, digital video broadcasting, video mail, video networking, and video databases.