Norcross, Georgia-based developer of fractal compression technology Iterated Systems Inc is gearing itself up for the Internet, and will be launching fractal products for still pictures and video early next year. The company holds several patents for the computer generation of fractals, which enables compression of pictures by turning them into mathematical formulae, working on the self-similarity within images. The result produces a very high compression ratio while maintaining the quality of pictures. Files are much smaller, and therefore less bandwidth is required to transmit videos and stills over networks than with other compression techniques.
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Iterated therefore believes that fractal compression is the ideal technology for the Internet. Its task now is persuading World Wide Web authors and others that this is the case, and to disseminate the technology as quickly as possible, it is giving its fractal decoder away free for use with Netscape Communications Corp’s Navigator browser and will be offering it for most of the other major Internet browsers early next year. It says that fractal compression will solve the speed issue for World Wide Web graphics. The technology supports a zoom facility, where a picture retains its clarity and definition from the minute it appears on screen as a thumbnail-size print, on and up to where it appears as a full-screen image. Bob Davis, vice-president fo marketing and business development, said Web pages would need only display the thumbnail picture, and users could then click on the picture they wanted to see, to expand it. This would speed up Web page graphics even further. Another advantage of fractal technology is that it is resolution-independent. Picture presentation will be the same on small, low-resolution screens, or large, high-resolution screens, so applications can run on a notebook or a workstation without blurring or blocking on larger screens or losing detail on smaller screens. The technology is already well tried and tested. Discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot at IBM Corp in 1975, fractal geometry was initially used in the academic world, but it already has a pedigree in the commercial sector. Microsoft Corp used Iterated’s fractal compression for its interactive encyclopaedia CD-ROM, Encarta, and Iterated is hoping to get its decoder into the company’s Internet Explorer browser. Iterated said it is talking to a customer with an application that involves it putting up around 500,000 still photographs a year on the Internet.
By Joanne Wallen
It is also talking to large imaging companies such as Eastman Kodak Co. On the video front, Iterated has submitted its technology to the MPEG 4 standards committee, which is deliberating on low bandwidth video standards, and Iterated is hopeful that its fractal technology will be adopted as an industry standard. Its video compression technology is specifically aimed at low bandwidth, on-line video playback, and the company believes that network bandwidth is unlikely to increase sufficiently in the near future to enable ordinary high band width MPEG2 video transmission as the norm. It therefore believes that the compression technology needs to optimise the available bandwidths, and its fractal compression is aimed at ISDN bandwidth and below, for example to run over an ordinary telephone line at 28.8Kbps. Video compressed using fractals will also play back on a personal computer without special MPEG boards or chips. As a demonstration of the quality of video playback, Iterated has licensed the movie trailer of Walt Disney’s new computer animated film, Toy Story, and runs it using fractal compression as well as MPEG 2. The quality at low bandwidth is extremely sharp, and the company said that the fractal file is about 400 times smaller. Iterated is also talking to firms about the use of fractal video technology for security surveillance and intruder verification, and says it has had a lot of interest in this area, due to the high quality of the video playback. Iterated said the main complaints about fractal compression in the past were that compression was slow, but it has made a lot of progress on this front, and it said that although compression takes more processing power than decompression, the speed of both has improved dramatically in the past year or two. The company is due to launch a product for still pictures this month, consisting of an encoder, application programming interface and a decoder, and a similar product for video in March. The programming interface, which will enable applications developers to integrate the decoder with their software, will be available over the Internet as shareware.
Changed its strategy
Users will be able to download the code, and use it on a month’s trial, paying about $40 for it if satisfied. There will be no charge for distributing it to customers once it is integrated in applications. The encoder for both stills and video will probably also be available through a shareware arrangement, but prices have not been finalised. Iterated said that it had been accused in the past of being expensive and proprietary, but it has totally changed its strategy. Once fractal compression has gained wider acceptance, the company will be licensing the technology to strategic partners and potential competitors. Davis said the company has recognised that it should no longer be concentrating simply on increasing its market share, but on increasing the overall size of the market, and is therefore keen to get the widest possible take-up of fractal compression. It will be publishing the fractal image formats, and will be discussing its techniques in open forum at the Imagetech conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in March. The Netscape decoder can be downloaded from Iterated’s Web page at http://www.iterated.com
