INTERVIEW with compression. The demand for compression is driven by economics not only because you want to put more media on a disk, but much more importantly, because you want to squeeze more media down a pipe. The reason that we have as much digital video as we do is because of compression. The fact that compression is out of the hands of the engineers and into the business guys’ hands means that they are turning the compressors up beyond what they really can comfortably handle without generating artifacts.
Where we want to be in the chain is at the very end inside the TV and before the LCD screen. That’s our sweet spot. Our goal is not to be in 200 movies a year, but to be in 200 million TVs that get made as well as the Blu-ray players, game consoles, and mobile devices—or just anywhere at the end of the chain. It is a permanent place for hardware and firmware that will do an improved job of restoring images that have been stepped on by compression. The end of the chain is a long-term, viable niche for computational imaging.
take this out of the software regime where it takes a second and a half to process a frame and process 60 frames a second instead? How were we going to build a digital human that will recognize the image and see what’s wrong with it and turn a knob to fix it? We knew the images could be fixed, but we needed an algorithm to do that, which turned out to be very difficult. With an enormous amount of work, we knocked those problems down one by one—but unfortunately, I can’t tell you how, because that remains our trade secret.
To video purists, they can’t stand to watch stuff that’s been sent down a cable, much less Netflix or YouTube. The purists need to start with Bluray or even 4K upscaling. In reality, though, most people don’t really care much about image quality, especially those of us that are old enough to remember the old “Hopalong Cassidy” black and white TVs where you had to bang on the side and move the rabbit ears around to get rid of the horizontal tear. We don’t examine pixels, we watch TV.
Where does DarbeeVision fit in among HDTV and Blu-ray discs that promote image enhancement?
What is the Darblet?
Media distributors need to use compression. That’s a long-term economic driver, which means that there’s going to be a continuing arms race between wanting to compress more and needing to do a better job of image repair during decompression. That translates into job security for people like us who are in the business of image processing. It was not a goal of DarbeeVision to do image improvement in the sense of fixing up decompression or getting rid of other artifacts that might accrue in the production and transport of an image. We also were not in the business of scaling or modifying the colors or de-noising the compression artifacts. Instead, we assume that common video processing will be done by equipment that comes prior to us.
We’re unique in what we do with DarbeeVision and we don’t attempt to compete with the major labs that are doing image improvement—we’re kind of complementary to that. It is our goal to be built into the billion transistor chips that are already in TVs. We know, from experience with the remote control, that getting to those companies doesn’t happen right away. I thought that our product was just too good and that it needed to get out there, starting as a real-time hardware accessory. But how were we going to
The Darblet is our after-market accessory product. About the size of a deck of cards, it has one HDMI input and one HDMI output. The Darblet has three viewing modes, along with a Darbee Level control, all settable by the user. One of the modes is Hi Def, which pairs with high-end equipment and high-quality video for the best results. The “setand-forget” for high-end is Hi Def mode with a Darbee Level setting of around 50 or 60. Everybody, even the harshest critics, has given it universal accolades. Another viewing mode is Gaming, which works especially well with video games and computer-generated films. If the image is computer
DarbeeVision Darblet™ Visit HDMI Video Processor www.eeweb.com 9