EETimes article about Prophesee-Qualcomm deal

Full article here: https://www.eetimes.com/experts-weigh-impact-of-prophesee-qualcomm-deal/

Experts Weigh Impact of Prophesee-Qualcomm Deal

Some excerpts:

Frédéric Guichard, CEO and CTO of DXOMARK, a French company that specializes in testing cameras and other consumer electronics, and that is unconnected with Paris-based Prophesee, told EE Times that the ability to deblur in these circumstances could provide definite advantages.

“Reducing motion blur [without increasing noise] would be equivalent to virtually increasing camera sensitivity,” Guichard said, noting two potential benefits: “For the same sensitivity [you could] reduce the sensor size and therefore camera thickness,” or you could maintain the sensor size and use longer exposures without motion blur.

Judd Heape, VP for product management of camera, computer vision and video at Qualcomm Technologies, told EE Times that they can get this image enhancement with probably a 20-30% increase in power consumption to run the extra image sensor and execute the processing.

“The processing can be done slowly and offline because you don’t really care about how long it takes to complete,” Heape added.

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“We have many, many low-power use cases,” he said. Lifting a phone to your ear to wake it up is one example. Gesture-recognition to control the car when you’re driving is another.

“These event-based sensors are much more efficient for that because they can be programmed to easily detect motion at very low power,” he said. “So, when the sensor is not operating, when there’s no movement or no changes in the scene, the sensor basically consumes almost no power. So that’s really interesting to us.”

Eye-tracking could also be very useful, Heape added, because Qualcomm builds devices for augmented and virtual reality. “Eye-tracking, motion-tracking of your arms, hands, legs… are very efficient with image sensors,” he said. “In those cases, it is about power, but it’s also about frame rate. We need to track the eyes at like 90 [or 120] frames per second. It’s harder to do that with a standard image sensor.”

Prophesee CEO Luca Verre told EE Times the company is close to launching its first mobile product with one OEM. “The target is to enter into mass production next year,” he said.