Q+A CENTER

HD Photo is geared for end-to-end digital photography, offering better image quality, greater preservation of data and advanced features. Its still image codec for continuous-tone images is underpinned by lossy and lossless compression, multiple colorspaces, wide dynamic range and extensive metadata.

"...Microsoft's new file format has tremendous potential in the photo market, combining many of the best features of JPEG and JPEG 2000. Supporting this format in Pegasus Imaging's Photo SDKs seemed like a no-brainer to us," comments Business Development Manager Marc Brechwald. "We also are excited that Microsoft and Pegasus Imaging collaborated on this project to develop plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop software."

Marketing Director Jaime Saeger told Advanced Imaging, if/when HD Photo is standardized by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (Lausanne, Switzerland) it likely will be known as JPEG XR. At their 42nd meeting last July, the Group discussed integrating new technologies—including JPEG XR—into the existing family of standards as well as continuing to explore additional options and solutions for "modern networked imaging."

With version 9.0.2, Common Vision Blox from Stemmer Imaging GmbH (Puchheim, Germany) is reaffirmed as a powerful machine vision programming library. Common Vision Blox offers a complete implementation of the GenICam standard (European Machine Vision Association, Frankfurt am Main, Germany). A special grid control provides access to all individual camera options without the need for complex development in any of the supported languages (C++, C++ Builder, Delphi, .NET, Visual Basic).

The GenICam implementation is not bound to the GigE Vision standard. And, plans are in place to address other GenICam-compliant acquisition technologies as they become available. So, Common Vision Blox is already "future-proofed," says Manager Marketing Peter Stiefenhöfer.