Yissum Research Development Company Ltd., the TTO for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has signed a nonexclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Adobe Systems to develop and commercialize a technology that improves digital image processing. The announcement comes on the heels of an agreement between Columbia University and Adobe for computer graphics technology that can simulate the natural movement and flexibility of strands as fine as a single human hair. (Read the post in the IP Marketing Blog.)
The Yissum technology, called Edge Avoiding Wavelets, enables better and faster detail enhancement and preserves edges when sharpening digital images. Image processing applications invest considerable computing power in attempts to enhance details in digital images and to enable users to accurately demarcate a specific object within the image. Existing technologies for enabling such functions suffer from various limitations. The Edge Avoiding Wavelets technology, invented by Raanan Fattal, PhD, from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Hebrew-U, uses explicit computations to obtain results traditionally obtained by implicit formulations that require sophisticated linear solvers. The technology avoids pixels from both sides of an edge, achieving a sharper, halo-free image. Its performance accelerates various computational photography applications by a factor of more than one order of magnitude, according to Yissum.
“Image processing has become a household technology, and faster, user-friendly applications are continuously sought. The new image processing technology invented by Dr. Fattal is exactly such an application, and we believe that it can be extremely valuable also for other image processing software packages,” says Yaacov Michlin, CEO of Yissum. The Hebrew-U technology has been applied to Adobe’s Photoshop CS5, according to Kevin Connor, the company’s vice president of product management for professional digital imaging.
Source: Imaging Reporter