perceptual measurement experts measure perceptual voice audio quality

Opticom

Home > Company > Corporate Profile


OPTICOM - Quality is our business!		Being the pioneer of perceptual measurement, OPTICOM has been providing the latest achievements of standards-based quality measurement solutions for voice and wide-band audio, since 1995. No matter if it's voice quality in telecommunications, audio quality of music and broadcast signals or video quality of TV signals: Quality is our Business!

> Mission: 'Optimum Quality for Multimedia- Communications'		Under the mission statement "Optimum Quality for Multimedia-Communications", OPTICOM provides top notch developments that will gain for its customers improved quality in audio and video services. With the new OPERA family of perceptual analyzers, the company again proves it's global leadership for state-of-the-art solutions to test and measure the audio quality of new media.
> Founders		OPTICOM was founded by it's CEO Dipl.-Ing. Michael Keyhl in 1995 as a "spin-off" company of the Fraunhofer-Institute, which is not only Germany's leading organization for applied research, but in fact better known today as 'the home of MP3' – the most successful audio compression format for the Internet. In 1997, Dipl.-Ing. Christian Schmidmer, also a former scientist with Fraunhofer's MP3 team, joined the board of owners as well as the management team of OPTICOM as CTO. Both, Keyhl and Schmidmer have been recognized by many talks, paper presentations and contributions to books and standards' publications, and have been granted several international patents.
> Company background		OPTICOM, a pioneer in perceptual quality testing technology: Perceptual modeling was driven by the work of Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg and Fraunhofer, the home of MP3. In the course of the early MP3 development, the need for perception based audio quality testing tools started back in 1987. Only two years later, Fraunhofer scientists presented the first perceptual quality analyzer: the Noise-to-Mask Ratio tester (NMR). Today, this work represents the roots of OPTICOM, and OPTICOM's developers benefit from their broad experience of almost 15 years in the research and development of perceptual based coding and evaluation techniques. Having been the sole point of PSQM licensing in the world since the definition of the standard in 1996, OPTICOM has been instrumental in the commercial introduction of PSQM and the technology of perceptual measurement as such. Today, besides our award winning OPTICOM products, our techniques and tools are not only available for licensing, but in fact can also be found in well known products from major industry partners.
> Driving international standardization		Through many international contacts and cooperation with leading research organizations, OPTICOM has gained a most active role in the international standardization business, e.g. of the ITU standards "PSQM" and the new "PESQ". OPTICOM was also a major developer and project coordinator during the development of "PEAQ", the world standard for perceptual wide-band audio quality testing. OPTICOM has been continuously active in, or observing the work of the AES, EBU, ITU-R, ITU-T, ETSI, ISO/MPEG and others. In order to further drive the success of our innovative quality measures, OPTICOM is opening new services www.peaq.org and www.pesq.org, two 'official' web sites that will be dedicated to detailed information on the technology, its implementations and applications.
> Awards		In 1999, Keyhl and Schmidmer were awarded with the 'entrepreneur's award' of the chamber of commerce, and since then OPTICOM's OPERA product family has won several awards, too.
> Customer base		In 2000, the company successfully established a North American sales office in California. Since spring 2001, OPTICOM has teamed up with Acterna ACO and thus established a global sales network. Our customer base includes the who's who list of the industry, as you can see from our references.
> Investor Relations		OPTICOM GmbH is a privately held company and is actively pursuing its vision of international technology leadership growth. VC and M&A opportunities are welcome. OPTICOM is located in Erlangen, Northern-Bavaria, GERMANY.
		[top]