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PRNewswire, Techcrunch: San Francisco-based flash LiDAR developer Sense Photonics raises $26M in A-round. The company's CEO and co-founder Scott Burroughs says “It starts with the laser emitter. We have some secret sauce that lets us build a massive array of lasers — literally thousands and thousands, spread apart for better thermal performance and eye safety.

We can go as high as 90 degrees for vert which i think is unprecedented, and as high as 180 degrees for horizontal. And that’s something auto makers we’ve talked to have been very excited about.”

The second innovation is "the sensor, normally part and parcel with the lidar unit, can exist totally separately from the emitter, and is little more than a specialized camera. That means that while the emitter can be integrated into a curved surface like the headlight assembly, while the tiny detectors can be stuck in places where there are already traditional cameras: side mirrors, bumpers, and so on.

The camera-like architecture is more than convenient for placement; it also fundamentally affects the way the system reconstructs the image of its surroundings. Because the sensor they use is so close to an ordinary RGB camera’s, images from the former can be matched to the latter very easily.

Our LiDAR system operates similarly to a camera by using a solid-state, high-powered, laser emitter coupled with a solid-state sensor with many pixels. Our system does not scan in any way—no spinning, no rotating mirrors, no pivoting MEMS mirrors—no mechanical movement of any kind.

Solid-state technology simplifies manufacturing, enhances reliability and eliminates concerns about vibrations or recalibration during the product’s lifetime."

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PRNewswire: SmartSens announces SC8238 as the company's latest product in its SmartClarity technology line. SC8238 supports 1/2.7" optical format 4K consumer video applications. Most 4K imaging sensors are said to underperform at low light conditions, have high power consumption, and a high price.

With its cost-effectiveness and superior product performance, SC8238 enables many use cases at lower cost and lower power consumption for such applications as smart home surveillance, security devices, video-conferencing, and sports cameras.

The 8MP device uses 1.5um BSI pixel and has the lowest power consumption among products of the same type. The product can reach a sensitivity of 1160mV/Lux-s with a maximum SNR of 36dB. Additionally, the sensor's DR reaches up to 100dB in HDR mode and 70dB in linear mode. SC8238 operation temperature range spans from -30C to over 85C.

"The cost-effectiveness and utility for consumer video applications makes SC8238 the most powerful device in our SmartClarity product line to date," said William Ma, COO of SmartSens Technology. "The sensor's capabilities make it ideal for providing unparalleled image quality while being able to satisfy the demands of multiple consumer segments at a competitive price point."

SmartSens will begin the mass production of SC8238 this June.

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Imec article "How to shrink a Raman spectroscope and analyze complex samples on-the-go?" proposes a way to fit a spectrometer onto CIS chip:

"The spectrometer chip is based on SiN-based waveguide photonics, implemented on top of a CMOS image sensor (CIS) used for electrical readout. The spectrometer chip as used in the current design consists of an array of massively parallel evanescently-coupled Fabry-Perot interferometers, varying in length in the range 2.2-152.8µm (in linear steps of 0.2µm). Incident light is coupled into the waveguide structures using a grating based in-coupler (GC). Sloped metal output mirrors are used to couple the light from the waveguide to the readout pixels of the CIS (see also insert with a crosssection of the chip in figure above). An illustration of the layout showing a top view of the F-P resonators together with the grating incoupler and sloped metal output mirror is shown in the figure below.”

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PRNewswire: Innoviz, an Israeli LiDAR startup, announces that it has expanded its Series C funding round by another $38M bringing it to $170M. Then initial $132M in Series C funding was announced in March 2019. The close of the Series C round brings Innoviz's total funding to $252M:

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Yole Developpement article on ADAS and automotive camera adoption is mostly based on its "Imaging for Automotive 2019" report:

"Cameras are now standard equipment for automobiles, with 124M image sensors shipped in 2018. Automotive camera modules have reached $3B and are expected to grow at an 11% CAGR, reaching $5.7B by 2024.

Over the past five years, viewing applications have been at the core of market growth – with rearview, surround-view, and black box becoming ubiquitous. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) cameras, which currently represent 40% of the business, will provide additional growth for years to come thanks to growing adoption rates.

Interestingly, the eruption of imaging in automotive has not fully benefit big incumbents like Bosch, Denso, Sony, and Samsung, which now must double their efforts in order to get back in the game. Intel and Sony will certainly use their respective strength and #1 overall position to gain market share in automotive, but already-established players like Xilinx, Toshiba, ON Semiconductor, and Omnivision definitely have an edge in this conservative, price-sensitive market."

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Sony adds 1/1.8-inch IMX347LQR sensor to its Starvis security and surveillance lineup. The new sensor features 2.9um pixels and has 4.17MP resolution with 16:9 aspect ratio. Nothing is unusual in this new sensor, it just fills a small gap in the company's expansive portfolio:

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SystemPlus publishes a reverse engineering report of Panasonic ToF module found in Vino Nex Dual Display smartphone:

"For 3D depth sensing, three approaches have been considered in consumer applications: active stereo vision (AS), structured light (SL) and Time-Of-Flight (ToF) sensing. SL was developed by Apple, which brought it to the market for the first time in 2017. It’s based on a complex system requiring several components, including a Global Shutter (GS) image sensor and a dot projector. The latter has been considered difficult and expensive to make due to the precision required. The ToF approach could be less complex and less expensive. You just need a ToF Image sensor and a flood illuminator to bring depth sensing to a system. In this field, only three known companies have solutions. In 2016, Infineon was the first to bring out its 3D ToF image sensor, developed with pmd, for the Google Tango Project. Today, Sony has the major share of the market with several design wins starting from low-end smartphones, such as the Oppo RX17 Pro in 2018, to high-end ones, such as the Samsung S10 5G and Huawei P30 Pro in 2019. This year, Panasonic has surprised the market with a new ToF Image Sensor in the Vivo Nex Dual Display."

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This is a year-old news, but I missed it at the time. Thanks to EF for pointing to that. 2018 International SPAD Sensor Workshop (IISW) presentations are published at IISS site. There is a lot of interesting stuff, for example:

• AMS SPAD update
• ST 40nm SPAD process
• Fastree 3D LiDAR
• Entangled photon imaging
• Much more...

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Analog Devices posts a video of the presentation of its ToF imaging solution at Embedded World 2019 held in Nuremberg, Germany, in March:



Analog Devices Garage, the internal new ideas research unit, posts more info on its development of ToF sensor, first presented at CES 2019:

"ADI is among a short list of companies with the expertise to enable high-performance, cost-effective ToF solutions and the Analog Devices solution has been in the market for several years. However, when faced with the challenge of operating multiple ToF cameras together – at least 10 with a roadmap to 64 cameras operating simultaneously in close proximity – the marketing and applications team turned to Analog Garage.

Atulya Yellepeddi, research scientist at Analog Garage, added, “There was a clear constraint on the solution side in that we knew we had to use the sensor and camera module with the ADI AFE. But we needed to similarly constrain the problem to be solved. Following the Analog Garage process provided the structure our teams needed to effectively collaborate.”

According to Pat O’Doherty, vice president of emerging business and head of Analog Garage, “The interference reduction algorithms that resulted from the ToF AGI are a shining example of going beyond silicon to create and capture value. It’s important to note that the innovation was the result of combining the BU’s deep understanding of the application and the device architecture, and the algorithm expertise of the Analog Garage scientists.”


Analog Devices is also working on automotive LiDAR platform, presented in another video:




Interestingly, the platform does mention Vescent Photonics OPA beam steering technology that ADI acquired in 2016.

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Qualcomm article gives some details on Nokia-Light Co. 5-camera smartphone image processing:

"The Nokia 9 powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform is a major achievement in computational photography. Thanks to a collaboration with HMD, Light, and Qualcomm Technologies, the Nokia 9 is the world’s first smartphone to feature a five-camera array. Every time you take a photo, the cameras collectively capture and process up to 240 megapixels of data, which is then used to create one stunning 12-megapixel photo and a corresponding 12-megapxiel depth map. This is the largest amount of photography data ever captured and processed by a Snapdragon 845 device.

The five-camera modules that make this possible are nearly the same. They contain the same image sensors, which have 1.2μm size pixels, and lenses, which have 28mm focal length with bright f/1.8 apertures. The only difference among the cameras is that two of the image sensors can collect color via the color filter, while the other three cameras use the same sensors without color filters. These are typically called “monochrome” image sensors and are capable of capturing 3X more light. So each camera captures the same image, but at varying exposures so you can shoot both very bright and dark imagery. These images are then merged with color images to build one master photo containing contrasting bright, dark, and color details.

the Qualcomm Adreno GPU is inspecting the 240 megapixels of data to render a 12-megapixel depth map. Most smartphones create a depth map that is a megapixel or less containing three to seven focal planes, but the Adreno GPU creates a massive 12-megapixel depth map filled with up to 1,500 focal planes. This level of depth enables photos with extremely realistic looking Bokeh and massive control over the blur-intensity of the Bokeh in the background and foreground. It also provides an astounding number of regions to shift focus to, so you can shoot now and focus later.

The depth maps are created as “Gdepth” files – Google’s official file format for depth maps, which can be used and stored in Google Photos."

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Imec Future Summits publishes a short video about its quantum dot IR sensors:



Another video presents low cost THz imaging:

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The International Image Sensor Society (IISS) Exceptional Service Award is presented for exceptional service to the image sensor specialist community. In 2019, this award will be presented to Dr. Savvas Chamberlain for his “Contributions to the organization of what is now the International Image Sensor Workshop”. The award ceremony will be held during the 2019 IISW at Snowbird.

After the 1986 and 1990 Workshops organized by Prof. Eric Fossum, Savvas chaired the 1991 IEEE CCD Workshop and 1993 IEEE Workshop on CCD and Advanced Image Sensors in Waterloo, Canada. Until the Workshop name transitioned to International Image Sensor Workshop, the name of “IEEE Workshop on CCD and Advanced Image Sensors” had been used. He also served as an organizer for the 1995 Workshop. During this period, the Workshop grew substantially and the workshop organization was established.

Savvas is well-known as the founder of DALSA. He started DALSA as image sensor design and image sensor /camera manufacturing in 1980 and led its growth to a 1,000-employee company. His bio is posted here and here.

Thank you very much for your big contribution to our community, Savvas.

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OSA Optics Express publishes a paper "Megapixel photon-counting color imaging using quanta image sensor" by Abhiram Gnanasambandam, Omar Elgendy, Jiaju Ma, and Stanley H. Chan from Purdue University and Gigajot. The new paper is a version of the previously published one in Arxiv.org.

"Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) is a single-photon detector designed for extremely low light imaging conditions. Majority of the existing QIS prototypes are monochrome based on single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD). Passive color imaging has not been demonstrated with single-photon detectors due to the intrinsic difficulty of shrinking the pixel size and increasing the spatial resolution while maintaining acceptable intra-pixel cross-talk. In this paper, we present image reconstruction of the first color QIS with a resolution of 1024 × 1024 pixels, supporting both single-bit and multi-bit photon counting capability. Our color image reconstruction is enabled by a customized joint demosaicing-denoising algorithm, leveraging truncated Poisson statistics andvariance stabilizing transforms. Experimental results of the new sensor and algorithm demonstrate superior color imaging performance for very low-light conditions with a mean exposure of as low as a few photons per pixel in both real and simulated images."

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Nature paper "Long-range depth imaging using a single-photon detector array and non-local data fusion" by Susan Chan, Abderrahim Halimi, Feng Zhu, Istvan Gyongy, Robert K. Henderson, Richard Bowman, Stephen McLaughlin, Gerald S. Buller, and Jonathan Leach from Heriot-Watt University, University of Edinburgh, and University of Bath uses 670nm wavelength to improve the SPAD sensor QE:

"In LIDAR (light detection and ranging) applications, single-photon sensitive detection is an emerging approach, offering high sensitivity to light and picosecond temporal resolution, and consequently excellent surface-to-surface resolution. The use of large format CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) single-photon detector arrays provides high spatial resolution and allows the timing information to be acquired simultaneously across many pixels. In this work, we combine state-of-the-art single-photon detector array technology with non-local data fusion to generate high resolution three-dimensional depth information of long-range targets. The system is based on a visible pulsed illumination system at a wavelength of 670 nm and a 240 × 320 array sensor, achieving sub-centimeter precision in all three spatial dimensions at a distance of 150 meters. The non-local data fusion combines information from an optical image with sparse sampling of the single-photon array data, providing accurate depth information at low signature regions of the target."

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BusinessWire: Quanergy legal battle with Velodyne goes on with no end in sight:

Quanergy plans to appeal the ruling by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) regarding the validity of Velodyne’s US Patent 7,969,558. Quanergy additionally announced that it is considering enforcement options of its intellectual property against Velodyne.

The ‘558 patent describes and claims a device and a process that is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, according to Quanergy. Spinning electromagnetic sensors with emitters and receivers have been around for decades. Quanergy provided the PTAB with prior art sufficient to invalidate the relevant claims of the ‘558 patent. Quanergy believes the PTAB ruling will be overturned on appeal.

Quanergy is currently considering assertion of one or more of its patents against Velodyne. Prior to seeing Quanergy’s innovative design, Velodyne’s LiDARs all included a spinning external housing that included the optical components, such as the HDL-64E and HDL-32E models. These LiDARs proved unreliable for continued use and manufacturing, says Quanergy. The main design change that allowed Velodyne to switch from its original design and make a significantly more reliable and manufacturing-worthy puck-type product line came about through implementation of Quanergy’s intellectual property.

“We are fully confident that Quanergy will prevail in this battle, as we are the true innovators and veterans in the space,” said Louay Eldada, CEO and co-founder of Quanergy. “We will not rest until our intellectual property based on decades of innovation and hard work is respected, and we receive the financial damages resulting from any infringement. We have seven issued patents that we intend to use to examine all LiDAR competitors’ products and protect our intellectual rights.”

“Velodyne Lidar Inc. is the inventor of the surround view lidar and we were confident that our patent would be upheld,” said Marta Hall, President of Velodyne. “The ruling was not a surprise because real-time surround view lidar was invented by our Founder, David Hall, and the company holds a number of foundational patents relative to this technology. We are an invention-based company and will always be inventing and innovating technologies, so we take protecting our hard-earned intellectual property seriously. In response to the ruling, we’ll be evaluating our enforcement options moving forward.”

BusinessWire: Cepton unveils SORA-P60 LiDAR. Based on Cepton’s Micro-Motion Technology (MMT) the lidar provides 1,200 scan lines per second for scanning fast moving objects. In combination with Cepton’s edge-compute hardware, the SORA-Edge, it becomes a powerful, mobile object classification and volumetric measurement device which can send its data over Ethernet, Wi-Fi or LTE to a central processing server.

“Cepton’s SORA-P60’s three scan lines, each scanning at 400Hz, enables accurate scanning for advanced classification of objects traveling at highway speeds,” said Jerone Floor, Cepton’s Head of Product. “To put it in perspective, 400Hz translates to a scan line every five centimeters for an object traveling at 50 miles per hour. This means you can measure the size of a tow hitch and trailer on a vehicle traveling on a highway in real time.”

“This new and unique technology has the potential to revolutionize the automated road tolling industry. Deploying Cepton’s high-speed scanning lidar as the prime sensor can reduce the cost of system installation by using fewer ground loops,” said Neil Huntingdon, Cepton’s VP of Business Development. “The SORA-P60 can complement automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) systems by pinpointing the location of a vehicle license plate, reducing the computing power required by traditional computer vision ANPR systems.”


Ouster introduces two weeks lead time guarantee for its older OS-1 series of LiDARs:

"Unfortunately, the lidar industry has a reputation for long lead times for delivery, and we often hear customers assuming that it will take months to get their hands on our sensors.

Today, we’re changing that and announcing the Ouster Lead Time Guarantee.

In the same way we’ve opened up the lidar industry with transparent pricing and honest specs, we’re upping the ante again by guaranteeing that if you purchase at least one OS-1-16 or -64 sensor from us or our distributors, we’ll ship your first two sensors in two weeks or less. No more waiting around for your sensors to ship. Your projects are too important for that."

Blikfeld and Koito announce that they will explore technologies to develop a LiDAR sensor that can be fully integrated into a headlight. The integration of Blickfeld’s LiDAR into Koito headlamps will enable automobile manufacturers to possess LiDAR technology in which the sensor is fully integrated into the vehicle.

Before Blickfeld, Koito has announced partnerships with Quanergy and Cepton, but these announcements can't be found on Koito site anymore. Hopefully, the new partnership with Blickfeld would not follow the same way.

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In the early 1970’s, soon after the invention of the CCD image sensor, there was great interest in low-light cameras using CCDs. At Westinghouse, Dr. Marvin White was working with the Navy on low-light CCDs. So-called kTC noise on the output node was limiting the low light performance. Marvin said he borrowed the general idea of double-sampling from radar signal processing at Westinghouse and applied it to CCD signal processing (see here, for example).

Since then Correlated Double Sampling (CDS) has been a mainstay in CCD signal processing to reduce noise and spawned the use of other noise-reduction strategies like DDS, CMS in both analog and digital domains. Probably every CCD made since the early 1970’s up through the present has employed CDS. For this pioneering achievement, the International Image Sensor Society (IISS), will be presenting Dr. White with the 2019 IISS Pioneering Achievement Award at the 2019 IISW at Snowbird later in June. Congratulations, and thank you, Marvin!

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DeviceSpecifications: Xiaomi SVP Wang Xiang explained how a smartphone selfie camera works from under display occupying the whole front surface:


Update: Chinese-language site IT Home publishes a demo of Xiaomi under-display camera:



Update #2: Mashable publishes a video on Xiaomi and Oppo demos of under-display camera:



Here is the official high quality Xiaomi video:

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ALA News: French Sofradir and its subsidiary ULIS announce their merger and a new company name: Lynred. Lynred will have a critical mass all-inclusive IR products to the global aerospace, defense, industrial and consumer markets. Its US entity remains a subsidiary and has been renamed Lynred USA.

Lynred's 1,000 employees will provide a range of advanced IR technologies, assure a long-term and reliable product supply, and accompany client projects with the IR design and equipment integration support.

“Lynred will enter the market with a new vision for the future in an increasingly competitive market, which has seen the number of players double over the last five years,” said Jean-François Delepau, chairman of Lynred. “We are the established European leader in infrared technologies. Now, Lynred gives us more punching weight in R&D and increased visibility within the IR ecosystem. Thanks to the commitment of our employees in forming Lynred and increased support from our partners, we will be able to offer new attractive solutions to our customers.”

The world military IR imaging systems market was estimated at $8.5b (approx. €7.6bn) in 2018 and is expected to grow to $14b (approx. €12.5bn) in 2023. Extrapolated market data also indicates that the market for cameras for industrial and consumer applications has the potential to increase from $2.9b (approx. €2.6bn) to $4.1b (€3.7bn) in the same period. This translates to a global potential annual market growth rate of around 10% at camera and system level.

Lynred will advance developments of next generation IR detectors with the €150M ($167.4M) financial investment it is making in the Nano2022 project over the next five years. These IR devices will be designed to address trends in autonomous systems for smart buildings (workspace management, energy savings), road safety and in-cabin comfort of vehicles.

Developments also include the very large dimension IR detectors needed for space and astronomy observations as well as compact and light IR detectors that can be used in portable devices and on drones.

"Our new brand name, Lynred, is inspired by the razor-sharp vision, feline agility, power, and performance embodied by the lynx. The Lynred logo evokes the precision, protection, trust, vision, and cooperative spirit that make our products and company unique. The stylized eye, historically present in our visual communications, marks continuity between our past and our exciting future," said Delepau.

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Forbes publishes an article "Meet The Company Behind The In-Display Fingerprint Sensors In OnePlus, Huawei, Vivo And Redmi Phones" talking about recent history of development of under-display optical fingerprint sensor, the market that has started from Synaptics but now controlled by China-based Goodix:

"Goodix wasn't the first to succeed in placing a fully functional fingerprint scanner underneath the display... After a year of fine-tuning, [Synaptics] Clear ID was officially unveiled in a Vivo prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2018, helping Vivo grab an impressive share of headlines.

Soon after, Vivo switched over to Goodix's in-display solution for its next release, the Vivo Nex, and the improved performance was immediately noticeable.

Today, it'd be easier to name phones that don't use Goodix's in-display scanners, as Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Meizu, Lenovo and OnePlus have all joined Vivo in using Goodix's scanner tech. This near monopoly of the market -- Samsung is the only brand using an in-display scanner that isn't made by Goodix -- has brought in significant revenue: Goodix made 3.8 billion yuan ($535.8 million) in revenue in 2018, of which 3 billion ($434.5 million) came from the fingerprint scanner business.

"We have 400 engineers, constantly working on our sensors from a hardware and software perspective," [Goodix's VP R&D, Carson] Ye says. "This includes fine-tuning algorithms, improving sensor light sensitivity, and things of that nature."


Here is another Goodix module taken out of the latest Xiaomi Redmi K20 phone:

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Infineon, Carinthian Tech Research, and Johannes Kepler University, Austria, publish MDPI paper "A CMOS Compatible Pyroelectric Mid-Infrared Detector Based on Aluminium Nitride" by Christian Ranacher, Cristina Consani, Andreas Tortschanoff, Lukas Rauter, Dominik Holzmann, Clement Fleury, Gerald Stocker, Andrea Fant, Herbert Schaunig, Peter Irsigler, Thomas Grille, and Bernhard Jakoby.

"In this work, we present a CMOS compatible pyroelectric detector which was devised as a mid-infrared detector, comprising aluminium nitride (AlN) as the pyroelectric material and fabricated using semiconductor mass fabrication processes. To ensure thermal decoupling of the detector, the detectors are realized on a Si3N4/SiO2 membrane. The detectors have been tested at a wavelength close to the CO2 absorption region in the mid-infrared. Devices with various detector and membrane sizes were fabricated and the influence of these dimensions on the performance was investigated. The noise equivalent power of the first demonstrator devices connected to a readout circuit was measured to be as low as 5.3×10e−9 W/sqrt(Hz)."

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As AT said in comments, there is another 11-min lecture by Makoto Ikeda from University of Tokyo: "Circuit Contributions to Performance of Imagers."

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IFNews publishes UBS Smartphone market report dated by May 22, 2019. According to UBS poll, interest to smartphone camera features and specs goes down, while FaceID interest goes up:

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IEEE Solid State Circuits Society has recently opened its Youtube channel with interesting explanatory videos on different topics. Makoto Ikeda from Tokyo University managed to squeeze an amazing amount of info in just over 11min video about image sensors:

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DPReview posts Google video about its multi-frame super-resolution algorithm explained in 3min:

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Engadget quotes Wall Street Journal saying that 3D camera maker Leap Motion has been quietly acquired by one of its customers UltaHaptics. It was said to be valued at 10x as much in 2013. Reportedly, Apple twice tried to buy Leap Motion, with its second attempt being as recent as in 2018. The acquisition has been officially reported in Leap Motion Blog.

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Autosens publishes a number of the interviews from its conference held in Detroin in May this year:

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