V-Nova has completed its first acquisition by purchasing the full global video processing patent portfolio of Faroudja Enterprises for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is intended to improve the efficiency of V-Nova's PERSEUS compression technology.
Guido Meardi, V-Nova CEO and co-founder, said: "These are exciting times for V-Nova and our customers, as we continue to expand our capabilities and grow internationally. New, disruptive technologies such as UltraHD TV, 360 video, VR immersive video and high-quality video transmission on any network can all significantly benefit from solutions that reduce the bandwidth requirements in a cost-effective and scalable way. By acquiring the highly complementary patents of Faroudja Enterprises' ground-breaking solutions, we are enhancing our ability to achieve this even further. Faroudja's technology has already been demonstrated to provide a bitrate reduction of 35-50% over an existing compression technique. A tighter integration with V-Nova's PERSEUS will leverage the codec's own bitrate reduction performance to provide even greater benefits."
The acquired patent portfolio consists of the Faroudja pre-processor (for use prior to compression) and post-processor (after compression decoding). The system also includes techniques for video enhancement such as multidimensional video processing as well as the use of a support layer in parallel with the conventional compression path. The Faroudja scheme is designed to complement compression standards such as MPEG-2, H.264, HEVC and PERSEUS.
The companies say Faroudja's patent portfolio strengthens V-Nova's existing software solutions, without requiring modifications to the standard codec. V-Nova is therefore able to fully leverage the value of Faroudja's patents within the PERSEUS hierarchical and parallel coding format.
Yves Faroudja, president of Faroudja Enterprises, said: "Our patent portfolio has been developed through years of experience in award-winning image processing and video compression. We are pleased that our innovation and hard work in developing industry-leading patents will now contribute to V-Nova's wider global strategy to enable operators and service providers to connect more people with high quality content, even when challenged by bandwidth constraints."