CIA venture arm invests in video improvement company, MotionDSP
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the nation’s intelligence services, has invested an undisclosed small amount of money into video enhancement company MotionDSP and also awarded it with contracts.
MotionDSP chief executive Sean Varah wouldn’t say what the CIA wants do with the technology. However, he said the investment lends credibility to the company’s technology, which was dismissed by Google during a pitch last year when Google told Varah that Google could something similar without MotionDSP’s help. However, the company’s technology has since gotten better, Varah said. The technology improves low-resolution images by tracking pixels as they change frame by frame, making intelligent conclusions about blurred objects or areas. Take, for example, a blurry photo of a person running in a white shirt in the dark. MotionDSP can follow the pixels of white as they move in a video, determine they are part of a coherent object and then reconstruct the shirt’s shape in a higher-resolution video.
See the “before” and “after” videos we’ve embedded below.
The company is conducting several pilot tests. It hopes to sell its technology to Internet video sites and mobile carriers to improve the quality of video captured by their customers. The company has raised a total of just less than $1 million, with $500,000 of that coming last year from angels. It has $1 million in contracts, Varah said.
The company is also helping to do filtering for videos, to help video producers avoid copyright violations. The DSP product comes in a desktop application, and also as a hosted Web service.
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Mariachi Band (Enhanced by MotionDSP)
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Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
