illumin8®

Enabling the world to ‘Go Beyond the Pixels’

Faster and lower cost delivery of high quality photo and

video content will change the world.

This paper describes a radical new approach to encoding.

By: J. Kolb and K. Granville

21 Aug 2018
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 Problem #1:
File Quality & Sizes

Big Files Cause Big Problems

Photo and video applications increasingly rely on high quality content,

such as; television (recorded, cable, satellite, streaming, and broadcast),
security monitoring, infrastructure and land surveying, as well as
numerous consumer and business use cases (e.g. photo, movie and
video game uploading, downloading, and playing).

Higher Quality = Bigger Files

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 Problem #2:
4k TVs and 4k content is a
“Chicken and Egg” scenario
Video currently accounts for over half of all Internet
traffic and will increase significantly as more 4K (4
times the quality of HD) content becomes available.

Consumers delay
buying 4k TVs because
there isn’t enough 4k
content available to 4k content streaming
justify the cost. will place much higher
demands on data
plans, which will cause
frustration as data
caps are reached more
quickly.
Delivering 4k content
on a disk is not
practical.

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 A history of trading off between
pixelation and blurring

In order to understand the problems associated with making

quality content accessible to the masses, we begin with a
definition of the term, ‘up sampling’.

Up sampling is an approach to increasing resolution of a

sound/picture/movie, with the goals of maximizing its perceived
detail to a human user, then we have a rich history of algorithms
and techniques to consider as solutions to the problem.

Much of that history lives in the realm of signal theory and

perception and has done an excellent job of removing noise,
© Copyright 2018 MindAptiv, llc All rights reserved
 enhancing certain types of detail, and allowing editors much
creative freedom in how they transform signals.’

Traditional up sampling of any signal field, which more

specifically might be a 2D color signal used as a picture or a 3D
color signal used as a video (with each frame being in the 3rd
depth dimension), allows for many useful processing operations
to work with the rectangular or box dimensions of the signal
field or ‘grid’.

The advantages of the grid are numerous but being able to use it
as a giant matrix of values has allowed many techniques to
immediately be useful for fields. Most of this relies on how grids
enable us to deliver ‘neighboring-cell’ information to predict the
colors or other values that are most likely present in a higher
resolution upsampling of the original.

Common techniques include preserving or eliminating edges or

softening/smoothing noise. Popular imaging software, such as
Adobe’s Photoshop, provide filters such as Lanczos (most
common), various Gaussian kernels, and other ‘finite impulse
response’ filters to alter the original image and remove harsh
grid boundaries. However, the tradeoff seems to be between
seeing pixel edges or blurring/softening the image.

With illumin8®, we can provide instant enhancement of quality

without the tradeoff of blurring/softening.

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 A New Approach

illumin8® processes signal fields, such as pictures or

video, into objects of interest. Using a patented approach,
these objects are folded into gradient streams of
information that allows us to preserve silhouettes and
later unfold the objects at different resolutions,
depending on the level of detail desired.

This approach not only helps us to preserve continuous

edges, color bands, and textured patterns, but also to
‘never show blocky chunks’ that reveal the underlying
grid structure of all the pixels since the data we’re using
to up sample is in fact object folds or ‘bit streams’.

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 In some ways, this is like turning pixel art into
vectors, but it is critically different.

Vector images, like the SVG format, contain

geometric shapes based on beautiful math.
However, none of those primitives, such as lines,
curved lines, circles, spheres, polygons, polyhedral,
etc. can efficiently encode the types of 2D
silhouettes or 3D sweeps that we see in natural
photos or films, such as people, nature, and other
items.

Instead of attempting to remap a pixel grid into

vectors, illumin8® remaps the pixels of the object
into a ‘folded geometry’, which is a spatially
programmed ordering. Similar to Zigzag encoding
or Morton ordering, but instead of following fixed
steps, illumin8® encodes & compresses the data
with a mini program.

The program uses 4bit opcodes to describe the direction

of a step, signal-sample prediction, and changes to
‘resolution-area’, which allows larger and smaller
areas to be predicted per step.

© Copyright 2018 MindAptiv, llc All rights reserved

 The features illumin8® delivers are:
1. Using illumin8®, we ‘never have’ blocky, pixelated edges
(unless it is intentional of course) that show the original
image grid of colors
2. illumin8® can encode different objects in a stream and
dynamically change resolutions based on the decoding
needs, such as higher or lower bandwidth, objects of higher
or lower interest, visual effects to promote focusing, such as
depth of field, and other user interactivity.
3. illumin8® permits us to use progressive downloading and
very deep ‘zooming’ on images.
4. illumin8® acts as a superset that lives on top of today’s
filtering and rectangular encoding so it does not compete
with existing solutions but can significantly enhance them. If
the entire image is flagged as a singular ‘rectangle’ object,
then it is encoded as just that object, which a traditional filter
can smooth-blur it into progressive zooming.

The formula processing contained in the illumin8®

product is actually fully integrated into the unified
pipeline, which is available to every product that we build.

This patented approach enables any company that

acquires or licenses this technology to own a broad
technical field, which can be a significant benefit in being
able to stay far ahead of competitors.

© Copyright 2018 MindAptiv, llc All rights reserved

 Visit our website at https://www.mindaptiv.com or
contact us at 720-442-7994 for more information.

© Copyright 2018 MindAptiv, llc All rights reserved