Visual Industry Guide
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From: https://newsroom.st.com/media-center/press-item.html/t4598.html
Sphere Studios and STMicroelectronics reveal new details on the world’s largest cinema image sensor
Jan 11, 2024 Burbank, CA, and Geneva, Switzerland
Sensor custom created for Big Sky – the world’s most advanced camera system – and is used to capture ultra-high-resolution content for Sphere in Las Vegas
Sphere Entertainment Co. (NYSE: SPHR) today revealed new details on its work with STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) (“ST”), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, to create the world’s largest image sensor for Sphere’s Big Sky camera system. Big Sky is the groundbreaking, ultra-high-resolution camera system being used to capture content for Sphere, the next-generation entertainment medium in Las Vegas.
Inside the venue, Sphere features the world’s largest, high-resolution LED screen which wraps up, over, and around the audience to create a fully immersive visual environment. To capture content for this 160,000 sq. ft., 16K x 16K display, the Big Sky camera system was designed by the team at Sphere Studios – the in-house content studio developing original live entertainment experiences for Sphere. Working with Sphere Studios, ST manufactured a first-of-its-kind, 18K sensor capable of capturing images at the scale and fidelity necessary for Sphere’s display. Big Sky’s sensor – now the world’s largest cinema camera sensor in commercial use – works with the world’s sharpest cinematic lenses to capture detailed, large-format images in a way never before possible.
“Big Sky significantly advances cinematic camera technology, with each element representing a leap in design and manufacturing innovation,” said Deanan DaSilva, lead architect of Big Sky at Sphere Studios. “The sensor on any camera is critical to image quality, but given the size and resolution of Sphere’s display, Big Sky’s sensor had to go beyond any existing capability. ST, working closely with Sphere Studios, leveraged their extensive expertise to manufacture a groundbreaking sensor that not only expands the possibilities for immersive content at Sphere, but also across the entertainment industry.”
“ST has been on the cutting edge of imaging technology, IP, and tools to create unique solutions with advanced features and performance for almost 25 years,” said Alexandre Balmefrezol, Executive Vice President and Imaging Sub-Group General Manager, STMicroelectronics. “Building a custom sensor of this size, resolution, and speed, with low noise, high dynamic range, and seemingly impossible yield requirements, presented a truly novel challenge for ST – one that we successfully met from the very first wafer out of our 12” (300mm) wafer fab in Crolles, France.”
As a leader in the development and manufacturing of image sensors, ST’s imaging technologies and foundry services cater to a wide range of markets, including professional photography and cinematography. Big Sky’s 316 megapixel sensor is almost 7x larger and 40x higher resolution than the full-frame sensors found in high-end commercial cameras. The die, which measures 9.92cm x 8.31cm (82.4 cm2), is twice as large as a wallet-sized photograph, and only four full die fit on a 300mm wafer. The system is also capable of capturing images at 120 fps and transferring data at 60 gigabytes per second.
Big Sky also allows filmmakers to capture large-format images from a single camera without having to stitch content together from multiple cameras – avoiding issues common to stitching including near distance limitations and seams between images. Ten patents and counting have been filed by Sphere Studios in association with Big Sky’s technology.
Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, currently showing at Sphere as part of The Sphere Experience, is the first cinematic production to utilize Big Sky. Since its debut, Postcard from Earth has transported audiences, taking them on a journey spanning all seven continents, and featuring stunning visuals captured with Big Sky that make them feel like they have traveled to new worlds without leaving their seats in Las Vegas. More information about The Sphere Experience is available at thesphere.com.
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OPPO, AlpsenTek and Qualcomm Boost AI Motion, Image Quality For Mobile Applications
Jan.11,2024,Las Vegas,USA—OPPO, AlpsenTek and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have teamed up with the goal of enhancing innovative Hybrid Vision Sensing (HVS) technology, to better extract valuable motion and image data to enhance picture quality for mobile phone applications.
OPPO and AlpsenTek will collaborate to pioneer the use of Hybrid Vision Sensing technologies, developing a data processing chain to collect relevant camera information to help enhance picture quality and allow for deblurring, augmented resolution, and slow-motion reconstruction, as well as other features required for machine sensing. This will be accomplished by leveraging Snapdragon® Mobile Platforms from Qualcomm Technologies.
“The HVS solution, with the support of hardware and algorithms, significantly enhances the capacities of smartphone cameras”, said Judd Heape VP, Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are pleased to contribute to the optimization of this new technology on our Snapdragon platforms – which will help consumers to get the best performance from their smartphone cameras, and capture what’s most precious to them.”
The Image product director, Mr. Xuan ZHANG, from OPPO commented: “Over the years, we have conducted extensive research in new sensor technologies, with a particular focus on HVS (Hybrid Vision System) technology. We have engaged in substantial collaborative developments with AlpsenTek and Qualcomm, involving numerous iterations in both chip design and algorithms. Our confidence in the potential of this technology has driven us to invest time and effort into refining it collaboratively, with the ultimate goal of pushing it towards the application on OPPO’s HyperTone Camera System.”
Motion information is crucial in photography and machine vision. Traditional image sensors collapse motion information within a period (i.e. the exposure) into a single image. This leads to motion blurs and loss of valuable motion data essential for image/video processing and machine vision algorithms.
Effectively obtaining high-fidelity motion information with a vision sensor is a top demand across various fields today. Current solutions based on conventional image sensors often rely on increasing the frame rate, which is expensive and impractical for many applications. High frame rates lead to a significant amount of data (much of it redundant) and short shutter durations, causing high system resource usage, low efficiency, and poor adaptation to lighting conditions for high-frame-rate cameras.
Event-based Vision Sensing (EVS) is an imaging technology that continuously records change/motion information through its shutter-free mechanism. It provides motion information with high time resolution and lower cost machine vision. With an in-pixel processing chain featuring logarithm amplification, EVS achieves a balance between high frame rate, high dynamic range, and low data redundancy for recording motion information.
However, EVS sensors often lack critical static pictorial information that is needed for many machine vision applications. It typically works alongside a separate traditional image sensor (RGB) to compensate for this drawback, introducing challenges in cost, system complexity, and image registration between the two types of images (EVS and RGB), offsetting many of EVS's advantages.
AlpsenTek's Hybrid Vision Sensing (HVS) technology, introduced in 2019, combines EVS and conventional imaging technology into a single sensor. The ALPIX® sensor from AlpsenTek simultaneously outputs high-quality RGB images and EVS data stream, providing a cost-effective and algorithm-friendly solution for capturing images with embedded motion information.
