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Sony Develops TVs That Zoom in for True Close-ups
prakslash writes "Sony has unveiled version 2 of its 'Digital Reality Creation' technology that allows viewers to pan around a TV image and then zoom in. Unlike the current TVs that simply scale the image, Sony's technology does 'true' zooming by digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture.
digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture
Ya know, I was going to make the obvious joke, then I realized that what I'm thinking about, I actually *don't* want to zoom in on. Some things are best left to the imagination, lest you see the reality (and the bumps and blisters and pimples). Ewww.
So, umh, this would be cool for zooming in on puppies and stuff. Yeah.
If only this was around for a certain Australian beauty queens strut down the catwalk last week. *sigh* Pan Baby!
I refuse to accept "digital zoom" as being any better than just putting a magnifying glass next to the same old low res image.
Come on, it's trying to create data that just plain isn't coming from the original source, therefore it's nothing but guess and check logic. Sure it my smooth out what it thinks is a rough edge... but that's still only guessing and making up detail that just wasn't there.
Wow and I thought FCC regulations were the only thing to come out of Janet Jackson's boobies. It goes to show that pornography still provides the incentive for innovation for all major developing technologies. It's actually a little known fact that the people offering the incentives for new space elevator technology are only doing so in hopes of losing their virginity in it one day.
Should be cool but a DVR is a must to take advantage of this feature.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
True zoom is a bit of a stretch.. The only way you could have a true zoom is if you have a higher resolution digital image to look at, or an analog image... This produce creates sophisticated, but generated results. There is nothing true about it.
Regardless, this is one of those features that "sounds nice", but I think its the company telling the consumer what to want rather than vice versa. Never once have I wanted to zoom in on a modern or high def television image.
Glad we'll finally be able to clear that Kennedy thing up.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
real zoom requires additional information, ie higher resolution than tv is capable of displaying. all attempts at "simulation" of higher resolution will result in digital zoom artifacts, that we all are familiar with.
unless tv has lower resolution than broadcast quality this is as fake as 200X DIGITAL ZOOM.
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
Come on. "true zoom" requires data that simply isn't there in a TV signal.
Sure, an HD signal can be zoomed and interpolated to some extent, but call it "creation" or not, there is only so much info that can be "guessed".
This is kind of a cool feature, for various reasons. I think some of the most obvious uses that come to mind (besides naughty zoom-ins,) include sports events (hey, that WAS on the line,) and anything where you might be trying to get a particular detail out of a scene. (Such as, in "The Fellowship of the Ring," there's a truck driving around in background during one scene.)
And before it gets said, I know that has been removed. Its just an example.
Please, there's only so much you can do with "digital enhancement". If you don't have the bits of resolution in the first place, I don't care what technology you are using, you're not going to create something from nothing.
my 4 year old dvd player has 16x zoom. big deal. used it once.
for those of u wondering which one of Sony's model would come out with this technology.. its SONY WEGA series.. check out the official press release
fifteen jugglers, five believers
There's already at least 12 algorithms around for scaling up an image:
e si zer.html
http://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_r
I'm guessing that Sony have simply come up with another one. Regardless of what they claim, you can't "zoom in" on an image with a fixed resolution, you're always going to be using some type of interpolation and this will introduce digital artefacts.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
Though it's easy enough to decry digital zoom as a gimmick, and in most cases it probably is, there are some (admittedly, highly specialized) implementations that produce really great results. Look at HQ4x ( http://www.hiend3d.com/hq4x.html )and its associated projects. It's primarily for images which don't breach 256 colors, of course, and it works best on simple shapes, but it's realtime, and it looks fantastic.
It operates via voice commands and goes CLICK-CLICK-CLICK when it's zooming?
Hmmm, I'll have to try that one with my girlfriend when she catches me watching the pr0n...
...but honey! They just digitally enhanced the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture...i'm just evaluating this in the name of technology! Honest!
It's not zoom, it's digital enhancement. Which is what zoom is. But this is different. Yeah, right.
More marketing BS.
I can only think of one genre of movies that this would be used for...
Remember Deckard's Sony photo machine?
It's like that?
Unlike the current TVs that simply scale the image, Sony's technology does 'true' zooming by digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture.
READ: Zooms image and antialiases the hell out of it. Same effect as crossing your eyes and sticking your nose to the screen, but now available from the remote control!
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...Sci-fi's that use arbitrary plot fixes on photos that lack the resolution they need by using a computer to "zoom in and enhance" the image. Sometimes it's so ridiculous that I wanna belch. The only way this could truely be accurate is if the TV signal carries more data (for example, zooming on a 1080i HD signal). But HD has yet to approach critical mass...ugh.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I don't know, it's probably just me, but I don't think adding a "feature" like this to a tv set should be a cause for worldwide hype in a normal world.
:P are (I hope) probably not targeted to people who understand the techniques laying behind.
:D
I mean zooming an image is no rocket science (and in this case is probably no good either). Recognizing public demand for such a function in the case of tv's and adding it could be good for businness. But hyping such a function this much... it's just a nobrainer.
But then again, the hype around these new functions and revolutionary enhancements
One thing to add from the image procssing guy's side: for normal pal-resolution tv sets a certain amount of everyday zooming wouldn't show that much zooming error as e.g. a plasma screen would. Just try grabbing a lowres low-bitrate video (lets say quarter pal res + ~500kbit mpeg4) and play it full screen on a 50cm tv set (many artifacts are smoothed out) and some 100cm digital (where they all remain visible).
But I still don't like the hype around it. It's like when MS said DB-based file system is coming in '06 and that will be so great and cool and all. When we first heard them we just looked at each other and wondered: with all their research facilities behind their backs, how come in some cases they all lurk so behind ? Another example would be using neural networks for learning and adapting applications. Anybody moving around in scientific research can come around many dozens of applications and research fields using them every year. Still, most of everyday people don't have a clue what that is and they all get easily caught into the hype tides.
Well, scientific research and company policies are not so close to each other as one would guess
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
It's superresolution!
There's actually a whole host of algorithms that go well beyond the junk they throw at us for "digital zoom". The two most applicable algorithms for this particular problem -- increasing the resolution of video above and beyond the source data available in a particular frame -- are temporal integration (collecting data across multiple frames) and superresolution by example (automatically associating and recalling high resolution imagery when a low resolution equivalent is shown). Some example code:
Temporal Integration: ALE
Superresolution by Example: Image Analogies -- not automated, but remains one of the cooler pieces of code ever shown at SIGGRAPH.
From the article, I'm guessing it's another ALE style stacker. They probably needed to write one for their cameras anyway.
--Dan
That's disgusting, shes like a hundred.
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JM
Oink, Oink!!
you gotta love any article where the word True is in quotes.
vk.
I don't see any (ahem) reason to use this feature. The killer app for resolution-upsampling, or whatever, is front-projection TVs! Instead of optically zooming up your image to full wall-size, complete with pixels larger than lego bricks, use this technology to zoom the signal up to the native resolution of a hi-res LCD projector. (or highest res available if its a CRT)
"I forgot my mantra."
This may be useful for helping (pardon the pun) smooth the transition to HDTV. Right now most of our cable channels are not HD, and the difference between the HD and regular digital TV channels is quite stark. On a large screen, regular digtal TV becomes almost unbearable once you get used to HD. But more importantly, perhaps many people are uninterested in buying an HDTV because they know how little content is available and realize that most TV is going to look just as crappy anyway. This could be a good marketing point for Sony- a processor that helps non-HD TV look better on your big-screen TV.
I remember seeing a demonstration about 12 years ago where Prof Barnsley showed how his fractal compression method could take a low resolution image (in this case a parrot) and encode it as a fractal. He showed how simply zooming the original resulted in the usual blocky image but when you zoomed the encoded image it still appeared sharp(ish). He zoomed into the parrot's eye which in the original was made up of four pixels and the fractal image still showed a round pupil although it did look a bit out of focus.
Another demo I saw on the British show "Tomorrow's World" showed how you could zoom in on a photo that had a fence and the fractal image showed the fence details that were again not visible in the original.
There was of course talk of using this sort of tech to do video upsampling for projection. Given the performance I saw I see no reason why a standard DVD couldn't have been cranked up to twice the resolution and look substantially clearer. Of course, the downside of fractal compression was that it took huge (at the time) amounts of computing power to compress, and bugger all the uncompress. These days I expect it is trivial.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
could it be some sort of fractal expansion? Probably too cpu intensive. eg... http://www.lizardtech.com/solutions/gf/
Not a sentence!
As anyone dabbling in image processing knows. Given any image information, you cannot add entropy to an image with certainty that it is correct.
However they label thier zooming, if they are introducing information into the image then you have a false image.
However, like the DivX 'warmth' plugin, randomised information can give us perceptual detail that is interpretted by our visual system to 'look right'
Otherwise all are doing is zooming with subpixel antialiasing.
In this day and age I think the signal is digital, so how is any modification of the original signal enhancing?
Now enhancing is a very broad word, but to me this article is a marketting trip to consumer land, nothing new here, move along.
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A typical resolution image coming off of a digital camera only prints at maybe 2 or 3 inches across at the resolution a typical (inkjet) printer operates.
Not true, because inkjet "resolutions" are really dot densities and not resolution (resolution would be how many distinct dots can you print per inch.) That's why laser printers with nominally "lower resolution" output crisper text. Also the dot density is for a single colour - complex hues such as skin tones have to be simulated by digital halftoning (essentially multiple dots forming larger colour pixels) techniques which reduce the effective resolution several fold depending on the colour being simulated and the accuracy desired. That's why continous tone printers such as dye subs with nominally "lower resolution" can give much sharper colour prints.
Software would have a major effect on the quality of colour prints from inkjets but that would mostly be from how the halftoning was done rather than the interpolation per se...
Sony Develops TVs That Zoom in for True Close-ups
No, they've developed a new version of a chip.
They don't even know when they'll start developing "TVs that zoom in for true close-ups".
Unlike the current TVs that simply scale the image, Sony's technology does 'true' zooming by digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture.
Using which definition of "true"?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...and digital PVRs simply record the exact MPEG2 stream sent from the TV station, no additional processing is involved. And at high bitrates you would be hard pushed to identify MPEG2 artifacts in any case (try zooming on on a well authored DVD and identify the artifacts).
This argument about "lossy compression" comes up again and again. You could say that everything is "compressed" from the original reality; it's a matter of whether you do stupid compression (drop the sampling rate) or intelligent compression (removing things that can't be heard/seen). It's all about getting the maximum perceived audo/picture quality with a given data rate. So, taking the same data rate, would you prefer "uncompressed" 8-bit video at 320x240 say, or MPEG4 "compressed" HDTV at 1920x1080?
Assuming it works perfectly, what this system has to do is make an artificially-intelligent guess as to what the low-resolution picture is showing, synthesize a high-res version of its guess, and show you that. Your brain can do the same thing, but you're aware of some effort and stress in the process (and you're also aware of uncertainty).
What will happen when you know that a friend of yours is sitting in the stadium at a football game that you're watching at home and you zoom in on a couple of pinkish pixels that represent the place where you know he is sitting? Whose face will it display when you zoom in? A generic anime-like face? Your friend's face? What?
When it guesses wrong, the mistakes it makes will be dillies.
The article said it showed that a dark spot in the river was a hippopotamus. How did it know? Did it have a database that said "this film takes place in a locale where dark spots in the river are probably hippopotami?" Or when you zoom in on dark spots in other bodies of water, will it deduce and render a hippopotamus, too? Hippopotami in the Okeefenokee swamp? In the Hudson river? In Walden Pond?
As with colorized films, the effect will be exciting for about a week. Then your brain will catch on that it is being cheated, and the zoomed in images will look clear and sharp yet, subtlely, unsatisfying, because it is showing only what the brain already knows is there... or fake, stereotyped detail that will look phony once you catch on to its characteristic "look." Finally, the only fun in the system will be deliberately zooming in on things you know it will make mistakes on to see the comic effect.
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