Nokia OZO VR Camera Integrates Comprimato JPEG2000 Codec
Comprimato, a JPEG2000 software codec developer, is supplying its JPEG2000 software codec for Nokia’s 360˚ virtual reality camera OZO. The output of the camera’s eight 2k x 2k sensors is lightly compressed and packaged into a single stream which Comprimato decodes in software for live monitoring and post production responsive enough to support dynamic rendering and real-time views of videos shot.
“Hardware-accelerated decoding was a critical part of our design specification,” said Guido Voltolina, Head of Presence Capture at Nokia Technologies. “We knew that in the the majority of directors and cinematographers would want a real-time view of what they had shot. Comprimato proved to be the codec vendor that could deliver the performance we knew we needed. Their software designers also gave us valuable support through the development of the product and of the interface, which allows the software to access the streams together.”
The eight output streams from the OZO are rendered together to create the complete, immersive virtual environment. The decoder uses Comprimato’s GPU accelerated processing, so that directors and cinematographers can see what is being shot. In post-production the consistency of the JPEG2000 encoding ensures that stitching is invisible.
“JPEG2000 has certain 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 or proxies, directly from the stream without additional processing.
“Finally, JPEG2000 is an open standard that was designed with a focus on interactive and high-quality applications. Therefore, the Comprimato approach to JPEG2000 is to deliver very fast, 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.” www.comprimato.com
