CONTEXT COMPRESSION WITH RB-COMPRESS 

Made for Smart Cities | IOT | Robotics

What problem do we solve with RB-Compress?

By 2025, the world will have 3 billion communicating devices in the smart city, IOT and robotics industries. This number does not include autonomous vehicles, and the number of Internet-connected devices with sensors of all kinds will be even higher.

  • Radio networks cannot be expanded indefinitely
  • The load on the infrastructures from 3G to 5G is growing daily
  • Radio cells can only be served best-effort
  • The demand for the transmission of content information is growing
  • The costs for 4G and 5G as well as for satellites increase with the number of simultaneously used devices
  • Our industrial customers are asking for an efficient way to store and transmit images more cost-effectively

How does REBOTNIX solve these problems?

RB-Compress reduces energy consumption by compressing image based content faster, more securely and more cost-effectively over terrestrial or orbital communication paths to low-power terminals. RB-Compress is able to recognise and segment objects individually. Highest priority is given to objects that are contextual and relevant. These objects are automatically recognised by an AI model and the objects that are important for the contextual information are cut out of the image. The individual objects can then be individually compressed.

How it works?

Each visual object can then be given its own compression layer. Objects such as text and others that are relevant to the transmission of information, such as traffic signs or license plates, are encoded at a higher bit rate than objects that are not relevant, such as small objects in the background. Unlike a motion vector method, the object segmentation single encoding method achieves a higher compression rate.

In the default mode, the encoder works with a GPU or CPU. In the highest AI mode, a GPU is mandatory for encoding, but for decoding, we still can use CPU only for realtime applications.

What economic added value do we achieve with this?

  • Low energy consumption for the transmission of visual information
  • More capacity on devices with little storage capacity
  • Higher runtimes for data acquisition
  • Higher quality in the recordings
  • Works on low-power computers between 5-15 watt
  • Reduces the load on cloud and internet infrastructures as well as mobile networks

RB-Compress

Examples

The following live demos show how the RB-Compress technology works. On the left, you can see an optimized RB Compress image that supports the AVIF standard. On the right, you can see a standard JPG process. You can clearly see the artifacting in the right pane of the demo1 where the JPG is displayed. In the area of Demo2 we have compared the orignal compressed JPG with about 2000 kilobytes (2 megabytes} versus RB-Compress with 361 kilobytes (0.361 megabytes).

Demo 1

Demo 2

About

RB-Compress is part of our RB-SDK (Software Development Kit). It is designed to reduce transmission rates and stability for smart city applications, IOT and robotics.

RB-Compress was developed by the software for very low power devices on ARM64. The goal of RB-Compress was not to develop a new image standard, but to transmit the highest information content with the strongest compression for A.I. developed applications.

Designed for next generation AI applications

The main focus of the development was the integration with tensors, which are used in all AI frameworks. This means that from a RAW 1-4 channels signal, we can process it directly from a Numpy array. An intermediate storage in another YUV or RGBx format is not necessary.

For image processing only JPG is used so far. Reducing the increasing energy costs for storage, bandwidth and processing is one of the biggest challenges of modern IT.

These properties make the application more efficient in supporting data processing within neuroanle networks.

Patent free and cleared

For system integrators, it is important to use royalty-free technology without patent encumbrance. REBOTNIX takes care of verification and registration as well as accounting of all patents for its own modules.

Compatibility

During its development, a high value was placed on compatibility. We follow the AVIF standard for all compression mode. Thus, RB-Compress runs without a plugin on the latest browsers version, shown in the this overview. Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari on Desktop and mobile is supported.

Low power at every step

In addition to the technical challenges, at RB-Compress we have always focused on providing the encoder with the lowest power consumption while ensuring fast processing compared to the reference methods.

Fields of applications

  • Smart City Applications
  • Airports
  • Security Applications
  • IOT with visual cameras
  • Monitoring car charging stations
  • Digital twins on factory floors

System requirements

RB-Compress is developed for low energy hardware ARM64 architecture, highly optimized for NVIDIA JETSON platform and our own hardware platform GUSTAV Edge.

rebotnix hardware components

Hardware Support

  • NVIDIA JETSON TX2 NX
  • NVIDIA JETSON XAVIER NX, ORIN NX
  • NVIDIA JETSON XAVIER AGX, ORIN AGX
  • BASLER GigE and USB3 Vision Camera Support
  • ALLIED VISION GigE and USB3 Camera Support

Our hardware for RB-Compress

RB-Compress supports all of our hardware products. You can use any of our hardware boxes with RB-Compress.

GUSTAV AGX Orin
GUSTAV Orin NX
GUSTAV Orin Nano (soon)

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REBOTNIX GmbH
Am Brambusch 22
44536 Lünen
Germany