Do you have an Xperia™ smartphone that comes with Mobile BRAVIA® Engine? Are you curious to find out more about what this Sony technology actually does? Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is a high quality image engine that utilises technologies that have been successfully proven in Sony BRAVIA® TVs for a number of years. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine combines contrast enhancement technologies used in Sony BRAVIA TVs with colour management, and adds sharpness filters and noise reduction to display vivid beautiful images and videos on your Xperia™ smartphone. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is included in most Xperia™ smartphones, and its effects apply to image and video viewing. Go on reading after the jump where we describe the technology in more detail!
To go a bit into detail, the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is a set of Sony-specific image processing algorithms which are applied to the rendering process when drawing an image or video on the screen of your smartphone. It’s on by default, in those Xperia™ smartphones where it’s applicable, but it can be turned off in the settings menu of your phone. The benefit of using Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is that the viewing experience is improved in a way that is optimised to fit the human eye, with more details, enhanced colours and less noise.
When the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is running, a software layer is applied to the decoding step for images and video, where the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine processing is done in real-time. This means that it does not alter the image or video file, but only the way it is represented on the screen. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine works intelligently and applies the effects depending on input, which means that the effects are applied in a way that is individually calculated for each picture. In addition, all of the algorithms in Mobile BRAVIA® Engine are calibrated for each Xperia™ product to improve image quality on the specific display. Below, we will describe the different effects along with images illustrating these effects.
Contrast enhancement brings out the details
With the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, the contrast in images and video is enhanced by making the darkest parts slightly darker, which results in a perceived higher contrast that brings out details in the picture. This contrast enhancement is adapted to each individual image to avoid further reduction of brightness on images that are already dark, and to strengthen the contrast enhancement on vivid and bright images. As seen in the illustration below, this will give your images and videos more dynamics and better perceived details.
Illustration showing the contrast enhancement effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.
Colour Management gives deep and vivid colours
Colour saturation is also increased for specified colour ranges when you are running the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, which will make the colours deeper and more vivid. In general, the human eye prefers deeper colours on photo and video. This is especially true for natural scenes. As you can see in the illustration below, the enhancement level and the enhanced colour ranges are calibrated to suit human eyes when running Mobile BRAVIA® Engine. This makes sure that colours on photo and video are represented in a way that is pleasant for the eye.
Illustration showing the colour management effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.
Noise reduction for clear video viewing
Another use case where Mobile BRAVIA® Engine comes in useful is when you are streaming low-quality video from online sources, as the compression algorithms usually used by common web services such as YouTube, often cause distortions and many artefacts in the image. For videos stored locally on your smartphone, there might also be a risk of noise depending on the video quality of your clip. The noise artefacts that most commonly occur when using such compression algorithms are block noise, and mosquito noise.
Now by using Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, all of these disturbances are greatly reduced as it reduces temporal and spatial noise caused by these artefacts in low-resolution video. Spatial noise reduction means that image noise reduction is applied to each individual frame, and temporal noise reduction means that noise between frames is reduced. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine combines these two methods to get an improved user experience when watching videos.
Illustration showing the effect of the noise reduction done by the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.
Sharpness filter increases detail level
As a final step in the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, a sharpness filter is applied to increase the overall detail level in the image. This is done by enhancing the edges, as seen below, and the enhancement is calibrated to increase contrast between different image areas, but still avoid an increase of the amount of noise present in the image.
Illustration showing the effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine sharpness filter.
As you can see, the effects of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine enhance the image viewing experience drastically. And the best thing is that you basically only have to pick up a fairly modern Sony Xperia™ smartphone to enjoy it, as this Sony imaging technology is included in most Xperia™ smartphones.
Do you find the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine useful for viewing your images? Check out the links below for more information, and drop us a comment if you have any questions!
Source: http://developer.sonymobile.com/wp/2012/06/21/mobile-bravia-engine-explained-video
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