Brief Description
ViaSense, Inc. developed software for image and video processing based on the biology of human vision. ViaSense IPeG software compressed still and video images two to four times better than any other available technology while preserving the same quality. The company's image-processing principles were further developed for transmitting DVD-quality video through the internet, adapting automatically to the bandwidth available. The ViaSense perceptual processing tool kit is still being used today in professional pay TV encoders.
The startup was spun out of discoveries by UC Berkeley Professor of Neurobiology William Owen and colleague Sean McCarthy, PhD on how retinal cells identify and emphasize what is perceptually important in an image and, in the process, compress the data for transmission to the brain. Their patented work drew on physics and optics to exploit nature's solution in the compression of photos and video.
Formerly known as Sensory Technologies, Inc.
Timeline
- 1997. Company founded
- 2004. UC intellectual property license acquired by Berkeley spinout Modulus Video
Inventors
Sean McCarthy, William Owen