Interview with Michael DeLuca, ON Semi

Vision Systems Design publishes an interview with Michael DeLuca, product marketing, Image Sensor Business Unit, ON Semiconductor. ON Semiconductor areas of growth, according to DeLuca, include intelligent transportation systems, security, medical, documentation/scanning, automotive, and consumer products. "Machine vision continues to expand into new applications," said DeLuca. "As technology expands, so does the need for automation and productivity, which creates new opportunities."

One of such unusual applications has been presented by Lumenera at VISION Show, a camera-based phonograph. While many people tried to implement this, Lumenera's demo sounds better than some others that I have heard:

Sony Updates Semiconductor Business Flyer

Sony publishes an updated flyer on its semiconductor business status. Compared with the previous updates from August and June, the image sensor annual sales forecast has been increased one more time from 360,000M yen in June to 390,000M in August, to 410,000M now, although it's not clear if it comes from a weaker yen or is the real sales growth:

Nominations for the 2015 Walter Kosonocky Award

International Image Sensor Society (IISS), the home of International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW), calls for Nominations for the 2015 Walter Kosonocky Award for significant advancement in image sensor technology. The Walter Kosonocky Award is presented bi-annually for THE BEST PAPER published in the calendar years 2013 and 2014 and representing significant advancement in solid-state image sensors. The award commemorates the many important contributions made by the late Dr. Walter Kosonocky to the field of solid-state image sensors.

In the past, only the IISW technical program committee members provided nominations and ratings to the nominated papers but IISS decided this time to solicit nominations from wider audience, i.e., attendees to the past IISW and anyone in the imaging community. The deadline for nominations is February 2nd, 2015.

Rumor: iPhone 7 to Have Dual Lens Camera

DailyMail, MacWorld, BusinessInsider and many other sites quote a rumor that the next generation iPhone 7 "camera might be the biggest camera jump ever... it's some kind of weird two-lens system where the back camera uses two lenses and it somehow takes it up into DSLR quality imagery."

XIMEA Reveals Photoneo 3D Cameras

Germany-based XIMEA presents 3D cameras of Slovakia-based Photoneo said to be able to resolve 50um depth difference at 1m distance:

The cameras feature:

• Real per-pixel measurement thanks to unique method of sensing
• Extraordinary scanning range thanks to laser technology
• Efficient customizable projection system (different Wavelengths)
• Ambient light suppression
• Customizable FoV (5° - 90°)
• Power efficient
• Fast processing and low latency
• Adaptive scanning: possibility to select high-res or high-fps mode
• No Motion Blur
• Future-proof: Scalable to higher resolution

Photoneo presents 3D face scan raw data from its camera with 0.5mm resolution:

100 Giga-fps Passive Camera

Nature publishes "Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography at one hundred billion frames per second" paper by Liang Gao, Jinyang Liang, Chiye Li, and Lihong Wang from Washington University in St Louis, MO. While somewhat slower than the previously presented 4.4 Tera-fps system, the new camera is said to be completely passive. The abstract says:

"further increasing frame rates using CCD or CMOS technology is fundamentally limited by their on-chip storage and electronic readout speed. Here we demonstrate a two-dimensional dynamic imaging technique, compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), which can capture non-repetitive time-evolving events at up to 10^11 frames per second. Compared with existing ultrafast imaging techniques, CUP has the prominent advantage of measuring an x–y–t (x, y, spatial coordinates; t, time) scene with a single camera snapshot, thereby allowing observation of transient events with temporal resolution as tens of picoseconds. Furthermore, akin to traditional photography, CUP is receive-only, and so does not need the specialized active illumination required by other single-shot ultrafast imagers."

A figure below explains the camera principle:

CUP image formation model.

The two videos below demo the fast camera performance on laser pulse reflection from a mirror and laser pulses racing in different media:

2r1y Presents Dynamically Illuminated 3D Camera

2r1y came out of stealth mode to present a structured light 3D camera with dynamically controlled illumination. Here is a quote from JPR Tech Watch on the 2r1y's approach:

The company's flyer says: "2r1y’s new technology starts with a resolution of 1MP at 33ms. Both the resolution and performance are scalable, allowing for 2, 5 and 10+MP depth maps... The technology has also been demonstrated generating high density 3D point clouds. A point cloud with approximately 2mm accuracy can be generated in under 50ms and with sub millimeter relative accuracy in under 400ms. Key processes of this new methodology are being demonstrated in the lab. The software which controls and ties the functions together is currently in development."