Thirty-three year head start
Faroudja®’s technology began in the early 1970s when Yves Faroudja and a group of videophiles invented state-of-the-art video processing technologies and began licensing them to other companies. In the 1990s, Faroudja became involved in the specification of High-Definition TV. Contrary to the projected rollout of HD because of its costly infrastructure and lengthy development time, Faroudja proposed a technology called SuperNTSC that would make existing NTSC content look near HD quality. Faroudja’s concept of HDTV is a more accurate reflection of what has actually occurred in this industry than the predictions of other visionaries at the time. In June 1998, Yves Faroudja was presented the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Emmy award-winning DCDi® by Faroudja
Faroudja produced upconversion equipment to allow broadcasters to continue using existing equipment to broadcast legacy NTSC material during the transition to HDTV. Faroudja then developed DCDi® (Directional Correlational Deinterlacing) technology to eliminate the jagginess that conventional upconverters introduced to diagonal edges in video. DCDi’s unique algorithm identifies all the moving edges in a scene and adjusts the angle of interpolation at each pixel so that the interpolation always follows the edge instead of crossing it, eliminating staircasing or jagged edge artifacts. This technology was first used in the Digital Format Converter introduced in 1997 and with its combination of decoding, deinterlacing and enhancement technologies, won an Emmy Award from National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2001. In addition to being used in all Faroudja Home Theater and High Definition Broadcast products, the DCDi algorithm is now incorporated into Genesis Microchip’s deinterlacers that were derived from the Faroudja technology. Consumer electronics products utilizing this Emmy award-winning technology are easily recognizable by the “DCDi® by Faroudja” logo on their front panels.

Film Mode Detection Technology
In 1989 Faroudja invented and patented film mode detection or 3:2 pulldown detection. Film-originated content that has gone through 3:2 pulldown for conversion to NTSC is detected and the original film frames are recreated by blending the fields back together. However, this creates an artifact known as “a comb”. Faroudja was the only company with “bad edit detection” capability to detect the original frames of film within the video stream and reconstruct an accurate image. This produced an image free of motion artifacts with full vertical resolution. This Film mode processing is widely accepted in the industry.

Cross Color Suppression
Cross color is an artifact produced by the imperfect decoding of composite video. High frequency luma components are incorrectly decoded as chroma signals, causing colorization where there should be none. This colorization can be detected in many types of “busy” scenes including tiled rooftops, herringbone patterned clothing, leafy scenery, etc. The most common and visible cross color artifacts are flickering that occurs at 15 Hz rate, flashing colors or rainbow patterns. The artifact can be eliminated in still images by using temporal averaging of the chroma signals, the same methodology that is used in a 3-D comb filter. However, this cannot be done wherever there is motion because of the motion artifacts created, just as with deinterlacing using field weaving. Faroudja’s Cross Color Suppression uses the motion detector to selectively perform the temporal filtering only where there is no motion in the image and to use the already existing frame memory for the chroma storage required. Even cross-color that has been encoded onto a DVD recorded from a composite source can be suppressed using this technology.

Aspect Ratio Conversion
Aspect Ratio Conversion is used to fit images on displays with different aspect ratios while best preserving the correct aspect ratio of the image. NTSC content, including TV, VCR, Camcorder and video games typically has an aspect ratio of 4X3.NTSC content can be shown on a 16X9 display using various forms of conversion, including Pillar boxing, Zoom and Non-Linear, referred to as Anamorphic or Panoramic. Faroudja’s technology varies aspect ratio and picture position to handle traditional 4 by 3 aspect ratio sources and the wider 16 by 9 HDTV aspect ratio on a variety of display types and video formats.

TrueLife™ Enhancement
Conventional video enhancement is done by a “peaking filter” that enhances the high-frequency components of the video signal. However, this creates unwanted artifacts. Faroudja does not use a peaking filter to enhance an image rather uses its TrueLife™ Enhancement technology to identify transitions considered to be the details in an image such as skin texture, freckles or hair. These detail transitions are deliberately enhanced making them more visible and more lifelike. The technology also enhances large edges to create greater depth of perception without introducing visual artifacts or distortion.

Motion Adaptive Noise Reduction
Noise on an image is typically eliminated or reduced by filtering. Filtering can be done spatially, (1-D), or temporally, (3-D). Spatial filtering results in a soft image with loss of detail. Temporal filtering does not create loss of detail, but if done incorrectly, does result in smearing or ghosting of moving objects in the image. Faroudja uses Motion Adaptive processing to reduce noise without introducing smearing.

Information Display Article (Part1) Information Display Article (Part2) DCDi Technology Review