Elecard Devices CJSC, a leading developer of codecs and products for digital video, today announced the release of Elecard ClearWork filter, a DirectShow compatible component implementing denoise functionality that is accelerated using NVIDIA CUDA technology.

Elecard ClearWork filter is designed to visually improve video content by reducing high-frequency noise. The filter supports interlace and progressive video and using the Elecard ClearWork for pre-processing guarantees stream encoding into lower bitrates with unvaried video quality. The ClearWork filter takes advantage of the computing capability of NVIDIA CUDA-enabled graphics processing units (GPUs) to significantly accelerate the denoising functionality. Concurrent utilization of several NVIDIA GPUs makes it possible to boost the processing speed up to 33 times as compared to standard CPU performance.

Elecard ClearWork filter can be built into any DirectShow filter graph, bringing into a final application such features as brightness and color channels denoising, automatic and manual noise level detection, additional video smoothing for further encoding. The component operates automatically by default: detects the noise level for every frame and filters noise accordingly. At that noise-free frames are not filtered. The filtering is performed in 4:2:0 chroma format, both brightness (Y) and color components (U, V) are filtered.

“Video encoding or decoding with denoising is a time consuming process. With NVIDIA’s CUDA GPU computing technology, we achieve huge speed ups in video data processing algorithms,” said Grigory Melnikov, Elecard ClearWork filter developer. “Video and image filtering applications can easily be modified to take advantage of the hundreds of parallel cores in a NVIDIA GPU. This enabled our Elecard ClearWork filter to minimize the processing time for video encoding or decoding with the denoise feature”.

The Elecard ClearWork filter is available for consumer and professional markets. Professional video experts can perform real-time HD1080i video decoding with simple denoise using an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU Computing board in their workstation. In fact, the Tesla C1060 with its 240 processor cores can perform real-time decoding of SD video with the most power-consuming denoise settings on. Similarly, the four Tesla T10 GPUs in the Tesla S1070 GPU Computing 1U system can perform real-time HD video decoding with the most advanced denoise settings enabled. Consumers can use the Elecard ClearWork filter for home video denoising using NVIDIA’s GeForce consumer boards like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX295.

Elecard ClearWork filter is offered for OEM licensing as of May 2009. Evaluation version of the filter will be available for free download from Elecard website within Elecard Codec SDK G4 v 1.3 in May 2009;

The component will also be included into new versions of Elecard CodecWorks Encoder and Elecard Converter Studio products. At CCBN'09 exhibition on March 21-23 Elecard is showcasing a beta version Elecard CodecWorks Encoder v 3.2 comprising Elecard ClearWork filter.