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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Ambarella iOne Supports 32MP Imaging on Android Platform

Business Wire: Ambarella announced the iOne SoC HD camera for Android OS platform. The iOne is based on a triple ARM CPU architecture. Dual-core 1-GHz ARM Cortex A9 CPUs provide the horsepower to run Android applications while a third 533-MHz ARM-11 handles real-time camera tasks and enables camera boot time of under one second.

The camera part supports simultaneous still photography and HD video recording - up to 32MP still image processing with high speed capture of 5MP images at 30 fps, and Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) with CMOS sensor rolling shutter correction.

The iOne SoC is sampling now to early access customers.


Venture Beat adds that cameras with the iOne chips will likely appear in the second half of 2011. Ambarella has 350 employees. Current Ambarella chips are used in devices such as the Sony Bloggie video camera and a host of others.

7 comments:

  1. Time for the display industry to catch up to imaging capture. I want a full wall 32Mpixel television in my house (and the content too)!

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  2. Are your eyes capable to see all the content :) ?

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  3. Well, not sure about my old eyes but generally, yes. I saw the NHK demo of 32 Mpixel Super HD TV (aka UDTV) at the Aichi Expo a few years ago and it was pretty amazing how much extra detail you can see at 32 Mpixels on a big screen. Previously conventional wisdom said about 8 Mpixels was enough for digital cinema but in fact according to NHK, 32 Mpixels is better and gives a much better sense of really being there.

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  4. The image needs more resolution that the eye for scenes to appear "real". Remember looking at a little 7-inch black & white TV. It always looked better than a 19-inch TV from the same distance. Here - http://news.deviantart.com/article/27174/ - is one discussion of the subject that indicates that 32 MP is not necessarily a big deal compared to the eye's resolving power. It is necessary to take this with a grain of salt, however, because the stated resolving power is really only achieved in the fovea.

    If we put 32 MP into, say, a 30H x 15V angular FOV, then we can divide the 576 MP in the discussion by 16 and get 36MP. So 32MP is probably close to enough resolution for normal viewing distances and plenty from the balcony.

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  5. "CMOS sensor rolling shutter correction" - this must correct for sensor movement but has to assume that the scene stays still, right?

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  6. well at 100Hz image rate, the rolling shutter effect is not very visible. SONY camcorder uses rolling shutter CMOS sensor, most of consumers notice just nothing.

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  7. The rolling shutter compensation is related to the image stabilization. Have you ever seen the wobbly bottom part of a 1080p30 video? The rolling shutter compensation fixes that wobble. I saw an Ambarella demo in Japan recently. Quite impressive.

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