Embedded Vision Insights: May 1, 2012 Edition

Dear Colleague,

I've got Israel on the brain of late, it seems. And it's not just because the 40 days of Lent wrapped up a few weeks ago with Easter (roughly coincident with Passover for my Jewish friends and associates). It's because Israel has become a particular hotbed of embedded vision technology and product innovation. Of the twenty current members of the Embedded Vision Alliance, three (CEVA, eyeSight Mobile Technologies, and Omek Interactive) are headquartered in Israel; many other member companies have Israeli subsidiaries.

Gesture interface software developer eyeSight is the latest company to become a member of the Embedded Vision Alliance. The company may be a familiar name to many of you, as I've covered it in at least two past news write-ups, along with a video-recorded interview and demonstration at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Last week, the Alliance issued a press release announcing eyeSight's (and other recent companies') memberships and upgrades. And a couple of days later, I discussed the company and its products and technologies in more detail.

Alliance Members who attended last month's Summit already know that the Alliance has contracted with New ARTech Technologies, Ltd. to solicit new member candidates and broaden the awareness of the Alliance within the computer and embedded vision industries in Israel. ARTech's principals, Roni Amir and Shai Mor, have cultivated impressively extensive contacts in the Israeli technology sector. This week, they are representing the Alliance at the ChipEx conference in Tel Aviv, which runs May 1-2.

Roni and Shai will be occasionally contributing content to this newsletter and the Alliance website. In response to my query about why Israel has such a large concentration of embedded vision technology companies, Roni and Shai write: "Geopolitical, demographic and cultural circumstances are behind the substantial infrastructure that has emerged for all aspects of embedded vision in Israel. The geopolitical situation in the Middle East has resulted in the development of numerous embedded vision-based applications, such as surveillance, security, and guidance systems. Demographic factors include a massive immigration of highly educated Russian scientists and engineers. And cultural influences include an entrepreneurial environment, partly the result of mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces."

"All of these variables have combined to create a flourishing industry," they continue, "encompassing numerous high technology firms, including more than 100 companies traded in U.S. stock exchanges, plus hundreds of startups. A diversity of disciplines is represented; industrial electronics, defense systems, semiconductors, Internet technologies, etc. Companies in embedded vision-related areas include those focused on image sensors and associated software (e.g., CMOS image sensors, touch-free interfaces for digital devices, and gesture recognition), semiconductors (DSPs, video processing ICs, camera chips, and SoCs for multimedia phones), mobile videoconferencing solutions, and various system implementations (surveillance, security, capsule endoscopy, and the like)."

Thanks as always for your support of the Alliance and your interest and involvement in embedded vision technologies, products and applications. Don't hesitate to drop me an email with any ideas you might have on how the Alliance can better serve you and the industry at large.

Brian Dipert
Editor-In-Chief, Embedded Vision Alliance

FEATURED VIDEOS

March 2012 Embedded Vision Alliance Summit Keynote Jim Donlon, Program Manager for DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) describes the objectives, to-date history, current status and future plans of the Mind's Eye program. Mind's Eye "seeks to develop the capability for visual intelligence by automating the ability to learn generally applicable and generative representations of action between objects in a scene directly from visual inputs, and then reason over those learned representations." March 2012 Embedded Vision Alliance Summit Panel Discussion Jeff Bier, Founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, moderates the panel discussion "Beyond Kinect; From Research to Revenue," at the March 2012 Embedded Vision Summit. Also participating are Jim Donlon (Project Manager, DARPA), Bruce Kleinman (Corporate Vice President, Platform Marketing, Xilinx), Bruce Flinchbaugh (Fellow and Manager of Vision R&D, Texas Instruments) and Colin Duggan (Director of Marketing, Analog Devices). The panelists discuss a broad range of topics dealing with embedded vision's evolution, current status, and potential future. More Videos

FEATURED ARTICLES

Start Developing OpenCV Applications Immediately Using the BDTI Quick-Start OpenCV Kit OpenCV is an open-source software component library for computer vision application development, a powerful tool for prototyping embedded vision algorithms. The OpenCV library supports over 2,500 functions, contains dozens of valuable vision application examples, supports C, C++, and Python and has been ported to Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS X and iOS. The most difficult part of using OpenCV is building the library and configuring the tools. Therefore, to make it as easy as possible to start using OpenCV, BDTI has created the Quick-Start OpenCV Kit, a VMware image that includes OpenCV and all required tools preinstalled, configured, and built. This makes it easy to quickly get OpenCV running and to start developing vision algorithms using OpenCV. More Designing High-Performance Video Systems in 7 Series FPGAs with the AXI Interconnect Embedded vision applications deal with a lot of data; a single 1080p60 (1920×1080 pixel per frame, 60 frames per second) 24-bit color video stream requires nearly 3 Gbps of bandwidth, and 8-bit alpha (transparency) or 3-D depth data further amplifies the payload by 33% in each case. Transferring that data from one node to another quickly and reliably is critical to robust system operation. As such, advanced interconnect technologies such as Xilinx's AXI are valuable in embedded vision designs. This Xilinx application note covers the design considerations of a video system using the performance features of the LogiCORETM IP Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) Interconnect core. The design focuses on high system throughput using approximately 80% of DDR memory bandwidth through the AXI Interconnect core with FMAX and area optimizations in certain portions of the design. More More Articles

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The Gesture Interface: Another Asian Smartphone Manufacturer Thinks It Makes Sense The Webcam: Key to Apple's 3-D Display Plans? eyeSight: The Embedded Vision Alliance's Latest Member Takes Flight Analog Devices' Latest Blackfin Proliferations Get Embedded Vision Religion Computer VIsion: The Free Online Class Has Begun More News