Prophesee steers event-based vision sensor towards industrial applications
Prophesee, which was founded in 2014 as Chronocam, is the first mass produced event-bsed vision chip aimed at machine vision technology in Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT. It is notable that Chronocam started out with the goal of addressing automotive applications where the low latency of event-based vision sensing could provide theoretical advantages.
The chip integrates Prophesee’s third generation CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) vision module and has a 640 by 480-pixel resolution. It is manufactured in a 180nm specialized CIS process and packaged by Kingpak of Taiwan.
Performance is scene- and event-dependent but the company quotes latency at 40 to 200 microseconds, while capturing up to 66 million events per second. Low light cut off is 0.04 lux and dynamic range is greater than 120dB.
In Prophesee’s event based imaging each pixel is asynchronous and only activates if it senses a change, or event. By only sending information in terms of addresses for changed pixels, the amount of power, data and latency can be much reduced compared with frame-based systems. It also allows higher dynamic range than frame-based vision and can run at much higher frequencies.
“After several years of testing and prototyping, we can now offer product developers an off-the-shelf means to take advantage of the benefits of our machine vision inventions that move the industry out of the traditional frame-based paradigm for image capture,” said Luca Verre, co-founder and CEO of Prophesee.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Swiss event-based vision startup launches next-gen chip
Development board offered for event-based vision
Chronocam changes name, raises $19 million
Report: Chronocam winning in automotive
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