Comprimato Provides Codec For Nokia VR Camera

Comprimato has provided its JPEG2000 software codec for OZO, Nokia's 360˚ virtual reality camera.

The codec compresses the output of the eight 2k x 2k sensors and packages it into a single stream. Comprimato then decodes this in software for live monitoring and responsive post production to enable dynamic rendering and real-time views of video shot.

The eight output streams from the OZO are rendered together to create an immersive virtual environment. The decoder uses Comprimato's GPU accelerated processing, allowing directors and cinematographers to see what is being shot. In post-production the consistency of the JPEG2000 encoding ensures that stitching is seamless.

"Hardware-accelerated decoding was an absolutely critical part of our design specification," said Guido Voltolina, Head of Presence Capture at Nokia Technologies. "We knew that in the real world directors and cinematographers would want a realtime view of what they had shot. Comprimato was the codec vendor that could deliver the performance we knew we needed. Their software designers provided valuable support through the development of the product and the interface which allows the software to access the streams together."

"JPEG2000 offers a number of big advantages in virtual reality video production applications," added Jiri Matela, CEO of Comprimato. "First, it is a wavelet compression scheme which means it is very gentle and produces predictable results. Second, the way that wavelet compression works means that you can extract lower resolution versions – proxies – directly from the stream without any additional processing.

"Finally, JPEG2000 is an, open standard, that was designed with a focus on interactive and high-quality applications. The Comprimato approach to JPEG2000 is to deliver very fast, very high quality encoding and decoding in software running on standard GPU and CPU hardware. For the OZO this means we can deliver high performance, practical tools running on standard computers, even for parallel processing of eight streams – no other codec vendor can achieve that."

www.comprimato.com

(JP)