Vision Chips
Centeye’s vision chips allow ultimate flexibility in sampling the visual field to rapidly adapt to dynamic environments
- Flexibility in resolution with variable acuity focal planes
- Flexibility in sampling rate with random access pixels
- Easily interface one or many with almost any processor
- High dynamic intensity range
Centeye is a fabless semiconductor company. We design our own image sensors and vision chips that are optimized for use in robotics, drones, and IoT. We do this simply so that we can have the vision chip we want.
The image sensor industry has blossomed these past few decades, largely driven by mobile phones. We are fans of this trend. However we observe that the vast majority of image sensors were developed by engineers having zero experience with robotics but substantial experience with photography, thus all image sensors are, in one manner or another, designed to be used in cameras that produce images humans can understand.
This has led to a compartmentalization- First you have image sensor companies that produce pieces of silicon that output just 2D matrices of intensity values (with higher dimensions for color). Second you have image processing engineers that start with such 2D matrices, run algorithms, and produce a final numerical result. We observe that these two groups of engineers, who are undoubtedly brilliant at what they do, both lack an overall perspective of both image acquisition and image processing, and thus are unable to take a holistic approach involving both hardware and algorithm design.
The above is not the fault of the engineers from the two compartments nor is it due to lack of curiosity- indeed we observe that engineers from the two compartments are curious about the other side when given the opportunity. The above is imply how the industry has evolved.
At Centeye, we consider the boundary between the two compartments to be an artificial barrier that limits innovation. Therefore we ignore it. At Centeye, the same group of minds is involved with both developing new vision chip architectures and with incorporating them into drones, robotics, and more, including developing image processing algorithms from the chips we design! This approach allows us to optimize a vision chip specifically for select applications, optimizing what is needed, and eliminate what is not needed.
The exceptional performance afforded by Centeye vision chips, including our ability to provide vision to drones weighing just a few percent that of other autonomous drones, speaks for itself.