Heard of the engineering graduate from Anna University in Chennai who came up with a revolutionary image compression technology that made big daddies MPEG, JPEG, GIF and TIFF look crude? He could soon be clambering onto your desktop.

In 2003, Arvind Thiagarajan invented ABO (Adoptive Binary Optimisation) to reduce the sizes of images and documents more effectively than anything that existed then.

Thiagarajan was working with the Singapore-based K K Women and Children Hospital when the head of cardiology at Asia’s biggest paediatric institute asked if he could help them transmit huge scanned images.

Little did the just-graduated engineer, with no specialised knowledge in imaging sciences, realise that he was about to create an IT revolution.

Thiagarajan was asked if it was possible to convert all the video images of echo-cardiograms, stored on VHS tapes, into digital formats.

To do it the traditional way would have cost the hospital a staggering $2.33 million and more than eight years. Plus, digitizing a 10-minute echo scan would require 16 GB storage space.

He devised a method whereby each pixel was seen as a value stored in a matrix and, by arranging and rearranging them, he was able to achieve a compression of 30 times without a single pixel loss in the process.

Impressed by Arvind’s achievement, an American doctor came up with a new expansion for ABO—‘A Better Option.’

Arvind wasted little time in getting an independent validation of his invention by auditing company, Ernst & Young, in Sydney.

Two years later, Arvind patented the algorithm behind the ABO. The IPO of his Singapore-based company MatrixView, promoted with investments from an NRI in Singapore and a Korean angel investor, was oversubscribed on the Australian Stock Exchange within the first hour.

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