Yissum seals licensing agreement with Adobe

Licensing deal

Yissum Research Development Company Ltd, the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has signed a non-exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Adobe Systems for the development and commercialisation of an imaging technology that improves digital image processing.

The technology, invented by Raanan Fattal from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is called Edge Avoiding Wavelets. It enables better and faster detail enhancement and preserves edges when sharpening digital images.

Image processing applications invest considerable computing power in enhancing details in digital images, and to enable users to accurately demarcate a specific object within the image. Current technologies for doing this are overly sophisticated and suffer from various limitations.

Edge Avoiding Wavelets technology is fast and uses explicit computations to obtain results traditionally obtained by implicit formulations requiring sophisticated linear solvers. The new technology avoids pixels from both sides of an edge, thus achieving a sharper, halo-free image. Its fast performance accelerates various computational photography applications by more than one order of magnitude.

“Image processing has become a household technology, and faster, user-friendly applications are continuously sought for. 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,” said Yaacov Michlin, CEO of Yissum.

Hebrew University researchers have been developing a strong and diversified portfolio of innovative imaging technologies, including 3D visualisation manipulations, real-time pattern matching, colourisation of still images and movies and animation techniques, all of which are available for licensing.