A brand new data compression method could not only aid in medical and scientific research, but improve video streaming quality as well.
The new process "outperforms" the JPEG, a University of California-Los Angeles reported.
Many of today's data communication and research applications require massive amounts of data to be captured and analyzed in real time. For example, if researchers wanted to look for rare cancer cells in the blood stream they would have to process a "stream" of millions of cells in real time.
In order to create a better method for accomplishing the researchers took inspiration from a graphic art technique called anamorphism that has been used since the 1500s. The method "reshapes the signal carrying the data," in a similar fashion to the old artistic process.
The team found they could accomplish data compression by "stretching and warping" the information in a method recently described by a brand new mathematical function.
The method, called "anamorphic stretch transform" (AST), is able to operate in analog and digital domains.
AST allows for the capture and digitization of signals that are faster than the speed of the sensor and digitizer in analog applications. The method can also compress digital records such as medical data.
"Our transformation causes feature-selective stretching of the data and allocation of more pixels to sharper features where they are needed the most," researcher Mohammad Asghari said. "For example, if we used the technique to take a picture of a sailboat on the ocean, our anamorphic stretch transform would cause the sailboat's features to be stretched much more than the ocean, to identify the boat while using a small file size."
AST can also be used for image compression; it can improve the speed at which images are compressed and the quality.
The researchers said the technique is based in both art and physics.
"Reshaping the data by stretching and wrapping it in the prescribed manner compresses it without losing pertinent information," Bahram Jalali, holder of the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronic Chair in Electrical Engineering said. "It emulates what happens to waves as they travel through physical media with specific properties. It also brings to mind aspects of surrealism and the optical effects of anamorphism."
