Fraunhofer at Mobile World Congress 2013

Experiencing authentic 5.1 surround sound on the move is now possible with any kind of stereo headphones thanks to Fraunhofer Mobile Surround Sound. Whether it be a favourite movie or the hottest new song, there is nothing to prevent you from enjoying the 5.1 experience on your mobile device. With Fraunhofer Mobile Surround Sound, the multi-channel audio experience is unmoored from the cinema or living room and brought into the street, the bus, the park or wherever you choose!

Configured to deliver best-in-class audio quality wherever you go, Fraunhofer Mobile Surround Sound is available for all mobile platforms and all mobile devices, including Smartphones and Tablets.

The only widely adopted Full-HD Voice codec, Enhanced Low Delay AAC (AAC-ELD), delivers CD-like audio for an unrivaled communication experience without compromises. AAC-ELD elevates the audio quality of fixed and mobile phone calls to the same level as our other digital media experiences. App developers can easily access AAC-ELD as it is now natively integrated in the leading mobile operating systems Android and iOS. This allows for the development of Full-HD Voice VoIP apps that enable natural, same-room communication experiences. Fraunhofer will demonstrate how easily app developers and streaming service providers can benefit from the Fraunhofer audio codec software in Android.

Extended HE-AAC is the latest codec upgrade to the AAC family. It provides significantly improved quality at low bit-rates between 8 and 64 kbit/s and above for both music and speech, while ensuring compatibility with HE-AAC streams. Target applications include music streaming via wireless networks and satellite broadcasting systems. At MWC, visitors can experience the high quality of Extended HE-AAC by listening to the codec on an Android device in a typical streaming and broadcast scenario. With this set-up the codec’s strength becomes obvious: Whether it’s talk radio, a music program or a jingle, Extended HE-AAC enables consistent high quality at low bit-rates for all signal types.

HE-AAC is the dominating audio codec for broadcast and streaming applications worldwide and has been deployed in more than 5 billion devices. Thanks to its unique combination of efficiency, high-quality audio and audio-specific metadata support, it is the perfect audio solution for new adaptive streaming standards such as MPEG-DASH. HE-AAC enables the best possible streaming experience from bit-rates as low as 24 kbit/s (stereo) to 320 kbit/s (multichannel).

The greater part of public life takes place in buildings. The Wi-Fi positioning awiloc® has taken a leading role in location based applications for this area. awiloc® has been evaluated by the Bavarian State Office for Data Privacy Oversight and functions autonomously on mobile devices.

No additional costs to establish specific infrastructure or data communication

By means of existing Wireless-LAN coverage, awiloc®, a 100% software solution, allows continuous 3-D positioning on current smart phone models with an average accuracy down to a few metres.

Enjoy access to customized services

Licensees of awiloc® technology enjoy access to customized services in order to prepare their own reference databases and implement their own location-based services.

Strong partner network – leading edge applications

awiloc® has been supported since 2008 by an open consortium. The partners have developed applications on the leading edge of trend – from emergency call systems to multimedia museum guides and games.

INCA camera enables to create automotive HD video content with high image quality and computing power. Hard- and software architecture provide the full range of connectivity, including HDMI, Ethernet interfaces or HD-SDI. The Integrated image sensors up to 4K offer additional metadata and can be connected via the integrated Bluetooth interface. Its powerful TI OMAP4 SoC-Processor is running an AndroidOS with all the advantages of a modern operating system. Complex algorithms can work directly on the embedded systems, for example, the Fraunhofer IIS SHORE™ (facedetection and analysis software). Ready for Internet of Things INCA is opening up completely new perspectives of picture interaction.

Fraunhofer HHI has developed an HEVC real-time software decoder demonstrating the benefits of the newest video-coding technology. Its advanced multi-threaded architecture is resource efficient and suits perfectly the ever-growing need for high-resolution video in applications ranging from mobile web streaming over high-quality TV broadcasting to very low bit-rate video conferencing with low latency.

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the next-generation video-compression standard of ITU-T and ISO/IEC. It was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) with significant contributions from Fraunhofer HHI’s Image Processing department. Compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC, HEVC achieves about 50% bit-rate reduction at the same subjective video quality.

Exponential growth in the number of users is pushing traditional mobile telephony to its limits. Yet in 60 GHz wireless technology small, very powerful, low cost radio cells can be built into large cells for extra support, while every street lamp can be used for millimeter wave radio. With its HIRATE - High Performance Digital Radio Testbed – HHI has developed a universal flexible hardware solution for the implementation and testing of future mobile wireless technologies. Signal processing by the 2x2 MIMO channels with bandwidth of up to 250 MHz enables realization of hardware-in-the-loop with MATLAB or real-time operations with FPGAs. Two applications from the platform are on exhibit at the trade show: real-time channel sounding and 60-GHz overlay for mobile communication networks. This refers to small mobile cells that supplement mobile end devices with frequencies in the millimeter waveband.

The Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) was specified by a consortium of leading mobile telephony operators. CPRI is an optical interface between radio equipment and radio equipment control hardware which paves the way for the rapid, efficient and, crucially, separate development of the two hardware entities. In this context, HHI has developed a universal, CPRI-capable, radio hardware for software-defined radio. This SDR radio front-end can be directly connected to other radio base stations via optic fiber and CPRI to create a flexible test environment for a broad array of standards like LTE and UMTS or cognitive applications for the Digital Dividend and TV White Space area.