Dual Aperture International (DAI) has raised $5.7M in Series A funding led by Value Invest Korea (VIK), based in Seoul, South Korea. eWBM, a licensee of DAI’s technology, also participated in the round.
Cheol Lee, CEO of VIK says, “In the past few years, many companies have tried to enable low-cost and low-power 3-D image capture, depth estimation and gesture tracking. We think it’s time to approach the problem anew. We see Dual Aperture’s technology as a game changer and with the engineering resources and world class engineers of CISS, we see an opportunity for Dual Aperture International to disrupt the imaging business in mobile and beyond.”
Dual Aperture's technology and alliances have been covered here, here and here.
Dual Aperture uses different apertures for RGB and IR and deduces depth from the resulting difference in sharpness. This is a neat idea.
ReplyDeleteMy big concern is the reconstruction of high frequencies. Traditional demosaickers assume identical high frequencies for all color planes. Clearly this cannot work for depth sensing, and Dual Aperture needs to reconstruct IR, RGB planes independently. Furthermore, this has be done with very low aliasing. Aliases of different colors have different phases and will result in large cyclic fluctuations of depth estimate.
The image reconstruction problem is formidable, especially since the plain RGBW demosaicking problem has not beensatisfactorily solved so far. It will be interesting to see how they solve these problems and how much resolution hit they take.