Among the plethora of multimedia announcements at Comdex, Norcross Georgia-based Iterated Systems Inc was showing off its first general product. Poem Videobox is a software developers kit that enables programmers to incorporate the company’s decompression techniques into their own products. Iterated’s system is claimed to produce data rates as low as 40Kbps for high quality video playback, which compares very favourably with the likes of the Motion Picture Experts Group algorithm. Moreover the fractal transform technique provides perceptual resolution independence: zoom in to a picture and instead of getting a blocky, pixellated image, the software gives a realistic effect by actually adding detail in that wasn’t in the original. At the moment, this particular function is restricted to still images – the horsepower is not available to carry out fractal enhancement on the fly, says the company. Iterated’s focus is on quick decompression techniques, compression itself is relatively lengthy, and even with a custom-built processor board sitting in an 80486 machine, the system will take between 25 and 30 seconds to determine the mathematical functions needed to regenerate each television frame. By this summer the company says it will have a full authoring package that will combine a frame grabber board with the compression software. In the meantime the $1,800 developers kit will enable programmers to get on and produce the end-user applications using sample video clips.
