Tuesday, October 13, 2009

DxO Lab Discloses Its Future Directions

In an interview with EE Times, Jérôme Meniere, chairman and CEO of DXO Labs, shrank the field of view and focused on DXO Labs' solutions for camera phones, and unveiled future research directions. DxO Labs also provides the calibration and tuning tools which allow the configuration of the ISP to be done more easily and at a lower cost.

Another marker of differentiation is DxO Labs' EDoF technology. DxO Labs said PalmPre smartphones and Nokia cell phones integrate its EDoF design.

Looking ahead, Meniere said he identifies several directions: "There are huge opportunities to help camera module manufacturers reduce their costs. The idea is to loosen some constraints that we recover and use at the image processing level. Typically, you can have a yield drop because the optic has been badly tuned. We can recover modules that otherwise would be thrown away, and here lies a huge gain."

Another direction concerns very high ISO, probably with associated noise reduction. Other possible directions were described in very general words, so I do not quote them.

DxO Labs, formerly known as DO Labs SA, was founded in 2002 as a spin-off of Vision IQ, a company in the field of computer vision. It currently employs about 100 people, including 60 percent in R&D, and has filed about 40 patent families.

6 comments:

  1. What do they mean by recovering Badly Tuned Lens?

    Deconvolution Sharpenning?

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  2. I think they mean using EDoF to make a fixed-focus lens sharp, even if it does not sit exactly in the right place and angle in the module.

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  3. DxO won't use the deconvolution to do the sharpenning. It implements the EDoF by color aberration.

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  4. What's EDoF?
    Where can I get info on it?

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Drazick,

    Some information (slightly dated) can be found at http://www.photonics.com/Content/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=31363

    ReplyDelete
  6. The trick is to develop a special lense that generates chromatic aberration on r;g and b channels. The "distorted" image is the post processed by an embedded cpu to recover field information and correct image.
    Again this means that a special lense has to be designed... and that the system is far from being 100% working!

    ReplyDelete

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