Archives for September 2019

Image Sensors World        Go to the original article...

PRNewswire: OmniVision announces the smallest-ever pixel size of 2.2um for a BSI, GS image sensor. The new OG01A sensor combines PureCel Plus-S pixel and Nyxel NIR technology to achieve QE of 40% at 940nm and 60% at 850nm.

The OG01A is well-suited to multiple machine-vision applications, including AR/VR headsets, drones, robots, and SLAM, as well as facial authentication in smartphones and other consumer electronics. This technology is also ideal for automotive in-cabin driver state monitoring and eye tracking.

"The OG01A has the industry's smallest global shutter pixel and provides the best NIR performance in a GS sensor," said Devang Patel, senior staff marketing manager for the security and emerging segments at OmniVision. "There is a growing need for global shutter technology to accurately capture images of moving objects, along with excellent NIR performance and small size, in camera applications such as AR/VR headsets, drones, robots and smartphones. The OG01A delivers the industry's best combination of features for these applications."

The 1.3MP OG01A sensor provides 1280x1024 resolution at 120 fps and 640x480 resolution at 240 fps in a compact 1/5 inch optical format. Samples are available now.

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Image Sensors World        Go to the original article...

Panasonic will be providing additional automated facial recognition gates for use at a number of airports in Japan. Without the need for prior registration of biometric data, the system compares photographic data of the traveler’s face in the IC chip embedded in the passport with an image taken at the facial recognition gate to verify identity. According to the Japanese Ministry of Justice, approximately 80% of all Japanese travelers use Panasonic’s facial recognition gates.


Forbes: Hong Kong protesters destroying facial recognition towers in protest at a surveillance state. Meanwhile, Chinese facial recognition company Megvii had secured a $750m fundraise ahead of its IPO on Hong Kong stock exchange. Founded by three Tsinghua University graduates, Megvii is one of the major AI surveillance unicorns in China, alongside SenseTime, Yitu and CloudWalk. Reuters reported at the time that the funding raised Megvii's valuation to "slightly over $4 billion," as it prepared for its IPO in Hong Kong.

BusinessInsider, Petapixel: Hong Kong protesters are using laser pointers in an apparent attempt to blind facial-recognition cameras. At least one reporter posted a video with the damage made to his camera while shooting the protests:




My Modern Met: Avoiding facial recognition becomes an art. A piece of jewelry by Polish designer Ewa Nowak is claimed to confuse AI systems and helps a person to avoid the recognition:


South China Morning Post: China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing is one of the first higher education institutions in the country to use facial recognition system to monitor the attendance and behavior of students.

“Besides attendance, the system installed in the classroom can provide surveillance of the students’ learning, such as whether they are listening to the lectures, how many times they raise their heads, and whether they are playing on their phones or falling asleep.

The school is taking action to cut down on students skipping class, leaving classes early, paying for a substitute to attend classes for them and not listening in class.”

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Image Sensors World        Go to the original article...

ON Semi publishes Arxiv.org paper "Deep Camera: A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Image Signal Processing" by Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam.

"A conventional camera performs various signal processing steps sequentially to reconstruct an image from a raw Bayer image. When performing these processing in multiple stages the residual error from each stage accumulates in the image and degrades the quality of the final reconstructed image. In this paper, we present a fully convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform defect pixel correction, denoising, white balancing, exposure correction, demosaicing, color transform, and gamma encoding. To our knowledge, this is the first CNN trained end-to-end to perform the entire image signal processing pipeline in a camera. The neural network was trained using a large image database of raw Bayer images. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed CNN based image signal processing system performs better than the conventional signal processing pipelines that perform the processing sequentially."

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Image Sensors World        Go to the original article...

2019 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW) papers are available on-line at the International Image Sensor Society site. The workshop has been held on June 23-27, 2019
in Snowbird, Utah.

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