ABO - an improved compressor: A Singapore company, MatrixView, claims to have developed a technique of compressing files far smaller than conventional methods.  It's called Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO).   "The year-old firm is working on a pilot project with the KK Women's and Children's Hospital in Singapore to digitise and store its videotape library of ultrasound images. These are images of fetuses inside the womb, taken with an ultrasound scanner. ..

"Arvind Thiagarajan, the firm's founder and chief technology officer, said that ABO can achieve compression rates far higher than commonly used methods, such as JPEG.  "With JPEG and JPEG2000 the compression ratio is six to seven times, with a lot of errors. With lossless JPEG the ratio is four to five times," he said.  But with ABO, he said a compression ratio as high as 32 times can be gained for image files. ..

Users can select compression ratios that range from mathematically lossless, for files that are byte-identical to the original, to higher ratios, for files that are visually identical with the original, but with visually unimportant data discarded.  .. The company plans to license the technology as plug-ins for other document, image and audio-video editing programs"

Another interview reports "we have developed actual "technology demonstration" products for the medical industry called EchoViewTM (for ultrasound archival) and DocuMatTM (for document imaging and digitization where ABO is able to optimise a raw TIFF file to beyond 154 times compression versus existing technologies of 20 - 25 times."

  10:34:36 AM    

Votewatch 2004 - Your Eye On Elections: A volunteer group of US election monitors; could be very useful in preventing (or documenting) another 2000 Florida debacle.  "Votewatch is working with large membership organizations in order to build a coalition of election monitors in 2004 that will help oversee our election process. Volunteers in selected states will be stationed at precincts and inside county registrars in order to closely monitor our elections. "   8:20:01 AM