Silicon Hive, Apical team for image processing

LONDON — Apical Ltd., a developer of software and hardware intellectual property for the processing and enhancement of images, has agreed to partner with Silicon Hive BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) to develop embedded imaging processing for mobile applications.

Apical (London, England) already supplies its image processing IP in the form of IP cores and programmed FPGAs. The two companies have agreed to combine Apical algorithms on Silicon Hive’s HiveFlex ISP processor family.

The agreement covers hardware accelerated retina-morphic and image transformations for camera phones and other terminals. Retina-morphic processing mimics the way the human eye and brain perceive images. Essentially this involves self-adaptive brightness and contrast adaption across an image to extract the maximum information.

Apical has agreed to optimize and port several of its image enhancement and processing ‘engines’ to Silicon Hive’s HiveFlex ISP 2200 programmable processor. At the same time Silicon Hive plans to enhance its HiveFlex ISP 2200 processor’s instruction set for Apical’s software resulting in more area- and power-efficient silicon designs.

The two companies have the so-called Iridix engine running on a HiveFlex ISP 2200 processor. The companies plan to demonstrate this at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain.