NVIDIA Announces Partnership with MotionDSP

Some news just came across the wire regarding a strategic partnership being formed between NVIDIA and a company called MotionDSP.  If you're unfamiliar with MotionDSP, the company has created custom software that decodes video files, extracts large amounts of data from dozens of video frames, filters the video using custom algorithms, and then re-constructs a new video which combines all the new data and enhanced frames.  The end result is a final video that is of much higher quality and of higher resolution than the original, that shows more detail with less video noise and artifacts.  We've got the full release regarding the partnership posted below, which talks about MotionDSP leveraging NVIDIA's GPU technology to perform much of the heavy processing, but also wanted to show you some videos of MotionDSP's technology in action. Below are three videos that show MotionDSP's frame-rate interpolation, video smoothing, and lighting and noise reduction algorithms at work.

In the video above, notice how much smoother the section on the right is in comparison to the original video on the left.  MotionDSP's technology samples data from multiple frames to interpolate what the missing frames should look like, and fills them in automatically.

This video shows MotionDSP's algorithm stabilizing the motion of a jumpy video, again using data gathered from multiple frames of data.
 

This third video shows MotionDSP's lighting / brightness enhancement with noise reduction algorithms at work.  The difference between the original source and final output is clearly visible and shows what MotionDSP's technology can do with video recorded under less than optimal conditions.

NVIDIA Announces Strategic Partnership With MotionDSP

MotionDSP Relies on NVIDIA CUDA Technology to Provide Real Time Enhancement of Consumer Video

SANTA CLARA, CA - SEPTEMBER 25, 2008 - NVIDIA Corporation today announced a strategic partnership with MotionDSP, an emerging leader in digital video software applications and a new NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem partner. MotionDSP relies heavily on the computation power of NVIDIA CUDA technology to accelerate its breakthrough video enhancement software that significantly improves the visual quality of consumer-created videos.

As proof that NVIDIA GPUs deliver more than just graphics rendering horsepower, MotionDSP engineers were able to achieve a 500% increase in numerical software performance after porting to CUDA. MotionDSP’s revolutionary video enhancement technology—shown with CUDA acceleration for the first time at last month’s NVISION 08 conference—allows users to clean up videos from cell phones, still cameras, camcorders, or the Internet. By tapping into the many parallel cores of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, and utilizing NVIDIA CUDA technology, MotionDSP’s software can immediately achieve real-time performance, something not attainable with today’s CPUs.

“MotionDSP’s powerful video software is one of the first consumer applications to use the power of CUDA, and will provide a new benchmark for consumer video processing on PCs,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. “MotionDSP’s technology has also been universally acknowledged by press, analysts, and consumers as the best on the market for improving consumer video. As the pioneer in visual computing, our partnership with another visual software innovator made perfect sense.”

MotionDSP’s software, codenamed “Carmel”, uses sophisticated multi-frame methods to track every pixel across dozens of video frames, and reconstruct high-quality video from low-resolution sources. MotionDSP’s software significantly reduces compression and sensor noise, improves resolution, and corrects for poor lighting conditions.

“NVIDIA is leading the market in visual computing on the PC and we are extremely excited to have them as a partner,” said Dr. Sean Varah, CEO of MotionDSP. “CUDA redefines what the PC is capable of achieving in computing. In our case, CUDA enables MotionDSP’s software to run in real-time, allowing our Ikena software to evolve from an offline video forensics tool to a real-time consumer application.  Our CUDA-powered “Carmel” software will be easy enough for anyone to use and will make powerful video processing on any NVIDIA-based PC a ubiquitous reality.”  MotionDSP expects the retail version of its consumer software to be released in Q1 2009.