Nokia OZO VR Camera Gets JPEG2K Compression For Output
Posted on Apr 6, 2016 by Alex Fice
Comprimato, a JPEG2000 software codec toolkit provider today announced it is providing its JPEG2000 software codec for Nokia’s new 360˚ virtual reality camera OZO. The output of the eight 2k x 2k sensors is lightly compressed and packaged into a single stream which Comprimato decodes in software for live monitoring and responsive post production to enable dynamic rendering and real-time views of videos shot.
“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 real time view of what they had shot.”
The eight output streams from the OZO are rendered together to create a complete immersive virtual environment. The decoder uses Comprimato’s GPU accelerated processing, meaning that directors and cinematographers can see what is being shot.
“JPEG2000 offers a number of big advantages in virtual reality video production applications,” said 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,” he added. “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.”
