Image Processing News: Mobileye, ST, CogniVue

Marketwire: Mobileye and ST announce that their jointly developed vision processor SoC, using Mobileye's EyeQ technology, is now deployed in more than one million vehicles around the world. With a growing list of manufacturers building the system into their vehicles, including BMW, GM, Volvo, Ford and many more, ST and Mobileye expect to continue to expand their presence in the automotive safety market.

Developing driver safety technology since 2005, Mobileye and ST have delivered two generations of vision processors that use Mobileye's collision avoidance technology and ST's automotive-grade manufacturing and expertise to 'interpret' a scene in real-time and provide drivers and their vehicles with an immediate evaluation. The third-generation EyeQ3 is in development and will be introduced by car makers as early as 2014.

"The deployment of our millionth device is a major milestone in Mobileye's development and growth, and speaks to the strength of our partnership with STMicroelectronics," said Ziv Aviram, CEO of Mobileye. "More significantly, it exemplifies the growing commitment of global automakers, lawmakers and consumers to making driver safety a top priority, a reality we can all be proud of."

Marketwire: CogniVue unveils its next generation APEX-2 Image Cognition Processing engine that is said to revolutionizes embedded vision technology. The APEX-2 makes significant advances in vision processing performance per area per power over the original APEX (which already had up to a 10x advantage over competitive approaches). CogniVue will be releasing new ICP products based on APEX-2 in 2013 and will also be licensing APEX-2 IP to strategic partners.

"Our ICP products, based on our current APEX technology, are already penetrating a number of markets. We see significant semiconductor vendors struggling with a lack of adequate vision processing IP (chips and software) to complement their existing processor architectures similar to when GPUs were first introduced for graphics processing more than a decade ago." said Simon Morris, CEO of CogniVue Corporation. "By licensing APEX technology to strategic partners like Freescale, we enable new embedded vision roadmaps in different markets, accelerate the propagation of our technology into even more applications, and grow our code base overall. With APEX-2, we have an even higher performance embedded vision processing platform with enhanced flexibility to advance our next-gen ICP product line while also enabling our strategic partners like Freescale."

"Today's collision avoidance systems are typically enabled by digital signal processors or field-programmable gate arrays. Freescale is taking a different approach by integrating CogniVue's Image Cognition Processing IP into our processors, providing massively parallel processing in small packages and with very low power consumption." said Ray Cornyn, VP of Freescale's Automotive MCU Division.