A "Unified Importance Map" generated by IQ264. Blue areas indicate blocks that are determined to be perceptually unimportant, whereas red areas are where the eye notices quality the most.
At Streaming Media West, on booth #216, EuclidIQ, a leading provider of video compression products that mimic the human visual system, will announce the immediate availability of IQ264, an encoding plugin that provides significant bandwidth reduction with no perceptible quality loss for any H.264 encoder. As quality of experience on every device from smartphones to smart TVs becomes an ever larger factor in the battle for viewers, traditional and over-the-top distributors of premium content are coming under mounting pressure to find ways to improve encoding efficiency on their MPEG-4 H.264 infrastructures.
Unlike pre- or post-processing optimization technologies that pre-encode or re-encode video files, IQ264 instructs the encoder by providing additional parameters important to the human visual system. IQ264 does this by applying perceptual quality optimization (PQO) to produce improved, standards-compliant H.264 encoding. PQO considers the way the human visual system (HVS) processes video and integrates such considerations into the video encoding process.
“Our IQ264 technology allows content creators and distributors to ‘get more from 264’ by creating the most efficient encode the first time media is encoded,” says Frank Capria, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at EuclidIQ. “We believe that pre-treating or re-encoding media to save bandwidth will always result in a loss of quality for users. Giving existing encoders more information about what is important to the eye, and what is not gives a superior result every time.”
One of the secrets to the success of IQ264 is in how EuclidIQ tests its results. For too long, encoding companies and manufacturers have relied on mathematical, objective, testing to measure video quality. The scientists at EuclidIQ have developed a practical, subjective testing methodology that generates meaningful results based on how the human eye perceives video. Armed with this data, EuclidIQ has created technology that enables a video encoder to make better decisions about which aspects of an image can be more heavily compressed and which aspects demand lighter processing to guarantee perceived quality.
“Computers don’t watch video, we do. That is why we use subjective testing with everyday people to confirm our results,” said Nigel Lee, PhD., Chief Science Officer at EuclidIQ. “The most advanced objective metrics fall short of subjective metrics and cannot capture video quality as accurately as subjective metrics. This guarantees that our savings are our customers' savings.”
IQ264 will be demonstrated at Streaming Media West on booth 216 at the Huntington Beach Hyatt Regency in California November 1-2.
More information is available at http://www.euclidiq.com
