Improving mobile ’phone camera images

As part of the agreement, Apical will optimise and port several of its image enhancement and processing engines to Silicon Hive’s HiveFlex ISP 2200 programmable processor. Silicon Hive, meanwhile, will enhance the ISP 2200’s instruction set. The first joint product sees Apical’s Iridix engine running on an ISP 2200 processor. Iridix is a dynamic range compression method adopted widely by leading digital camera manufacturers. It differs from conventional methods in that it applies different tonal and colour transformations to every pixel in a source image. Apical says it mimics the way in which the human retina adapts to scenes of high and variable contrast. The ISP 2200 processor, meanwhile, can process more than 100Mpixel/s. According to Silicon Hive, the device is C programmable and can be scaled to meet the needs of cmos image sensor or imaging SoC manufacturers. “Using the Hiveflex ISP 2000 processors, we are able to implement sophisticated image algorithms in a fully programmable environment, while maintaining the high performance and low power characteristic of optimized hardware. This is an attractive combination for mobile device manufacturers seeking both differentiation in image quality and highly efficient processing,” said Apical ceo Michael Tusch.