NEC recently announced that it has developed a new display technology that can dramatically improve image quality. Dubbed as Super resolution, it is a technology used to sharpen out-of-focus images that have been enlarged using a general up-scaling process (such as a bilinear or bicubic process), thereby delivering an image with high-quality resolution. Super Resolution can be used to improve the quality of low-resolution video and still images in a variety of applications. Basically the new technology reduces the blurring that occurs when low-resolution images are expanded and displayed in high-resolution.

Super-Resolution Technology

Previous image-resolution technologies used a multiframe technique to process image data, which required large-capacity external memory that made it expensive and difficult to create hardware capable of real-time processing. NEC Electronics' new technology enables very high-resolution processing with just one frame of image data. Reducing the processing load eliminates the need for expensive, external high-capacity memory, such as double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM, thereby reducing cost and power consumption, and simplifying connections to existing systems. With standard video interfaces such as 24-bit CMOS I/O with RGB or YUV for easy connection, the super-resolution ASSP easily can be added to existing designs.

The technology enhances image data from quarter video graphics array (QVGA) resolution (320 x 240 pixels) to wide VGA (WVGA) resolution (800 x 480 pixels) for clear image display on mobile phones and car navigation systems. The technology also achieves crisp images in 1920 x 1080-pixel high-definition (HD) television broadcasts by boosting image data in the 640 x 480-pixel VGA format ordinarily used for TV broadcasts and DVD storage to 6x the resolution.