PR Newswire: Dual Aperture keeps announcing its partners. Recently, it has announced its image sensor partner (Hynix/SiliconFile) and DSP partner (eWBM). Now the company says that it cooperates with Ability Enterprise on camera design. Ability Enterprise and Dual Aperture partner together on a technology licensing agreement whereby Ability Enterprise will incorporate Dual Aperture's 4-color sensor technology, image processing algorithms and various application software, into their latest line of camera module products.
Dual Aperture's technology utilizes a proprietary 4-color sensor design comprised of RGB and IR pixels. Built with separate apertures for the RGB and IR pixels, the sensor is able to generate two distinct images, one in the RGB spectrum and the other in the IR, with a single capture. This allows to estimate a depth of the image, as explained in a Youtube video:
Everytime I see one of these demos (Pelican Imaging, Dual Aperture, Linx Imaging, etc.), I think how innovative the PrimeSense guys were. It is now almost 10 years later, and people are trying to catch up, and look at how shitty the catch up players are...
ReplyDeleteBesides the ToF guys, nobody is able to generate a depth map anywhere near the quality that PrimeSense was able to do in their first generation processor. And when you add price to the equation, ToF falls short of expectation.
Nobody seems to really understand how to capture depth and the trade-offs between various techniques and parameters, and yet they're able to get millions in funding. I am not sure why VCs are pouring millions into reproducing old academic papers. I guess the perceived market size for depth imaging must be really large.