After four years of stealth development by a handpicked team of scientists, mathematicians and engineers, Pulsent Corporation today revealed a radical new approach to video compression that finally breaks the technical and practical barriers to delivering true broadcast quality video over broadband networks. Pulsent?s technology provides a 400 percent improvement in bandwidth and storage efficiency over existing block-based video compression schemes like MPEG-2. The breakthrough enables telephone companies and other service providers for the first time to deliver full-screen, broadcast-quality video into the home at 1.1 Mbps ? with the same clarity and resolution that television viewers have come to expect. Read more...

Today?s leading video technologies, such as MPEG, utilize a ?block-based? approach to compressing digital video information. This method divides a video frame into arbitrary blocks of a given size, then removes redundancies by attempting to match and reuse blocks from previous frames for the current frame. Pulsent?s innovative approach to video compression side-steps the constraints of block-based methods by processing video images in a fundamentally different way. Pulsent?s technology identifies the true structural elements (?objects?) in any video scene and efficiently models their motion. Pulsent?s ?objects? are the natural, elastic constituent components of any image and they directly correspond to parts of real-world objects. Once identified, the frame-to-frame motion of these ?objects? can be far more accurately modeled than with block-based approaches. How these objects are chosen and traced throughout the frames of a movie is not explicitly explained by Pulsent. Also their video codec which will be presented in April 2002 at the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas is only the first step. Pulsent plans to introduce a chipset to enable decoding on playback devices. Source: Pulsent Corporation