Image chip lowers the cost of auto real-time vision systems

R Colin Johnson

May 14, 2007

R Colin Johnson

Automotive vision systems can alert you when you veer out of your lane, or when there are pedestrians behind you or other vehicles in your blind spot. They can even help you parallel park without hitting the curb. Thus far, however, the systems' high cost has relegated them largely to luxury vehicles.

Now the Swiss Center for Electronics and (CSEM S.A.; Neuchatel, Switzerland) claims to have the technology to lower the cost of such systems from thousands of dollars to hundreds. CSEM envisions OEMs designing the ViSe smart image sensor into real-time vision systems cheap enough to become standard equipment on automobiles worldwide.

"We think the ViSe image chip has enormous potential," said David Alexander, senior analyst at ABI Research, which recently completed a study of the market for automotive lane-departure sensing systems. "With safety applications in particular, real-time reactions are of vital importance, so you usually need an expensive, high-performance image processor. But with the ViSe image chip, you don't need as powerful a processor, dramatically bringing down the price of these systems."

The worldwide market for new vehicles is 60 million units annually, according to the ABI report, but this year only about 25,000 will ship with lane-departure warning systems installed. Unless the price of such systems comes down dramatically, ABI predicts, they will ship in only about 300,000 vehicles in 2012.

But "if CSEM can bring that cost down from $2,000 to $200, then you could expect 10 times more systems to be installed, or as many as 3 million worldwide by 2012," said Alexander.

CSEM, which is partly supported by public funds, has a licensing-based business model. It has already licensed customized versions of its ViSe real-time solution to OEMs that supply optical character-recognition systems to banks for scanning checks. Adelsa Group LLC (San Francisco) handles licensing to U.S. companies.

Now CSEM has put together demonstrations, including an evaluation kit with application code, for automotive lane-departure warning systems, night vision systems, parking assistance, vehicle occupancy monitoring, pedestrian detection and blind-spot monitoring. CSEM also supplies demonstrations for security applications, such as intrusion detection systems that key on human movement but ignore pets' comings and goings, and for industrial machine vision.

"This is not research; the ViSe image chip is the product of an eight-year development effort," said ABI's Alexander. "They are in their third generation already, and the next generation will put everything onto one chip."

The current OEM kit is a two-chip solution that pairs the proprietary vision sensor with an inexpensive Blackfin DSP from Analog Devices Inc. Next, CSEM plans to integrate a proprietary DSP cell with its imager in a one-chip solution. To demonstrate that even its current offerings have radically reduced the necessary data rate, thus lowering the cost of smart camera applications from thousands to hundreds of dollars, CSEM is offering a wireless evaluation kit, called ViSeLink, that includes its two-chip solution plus a Bluetooth radio chip inside a camera housing with a lens.

"The way automotive vision systems are built today, you don't have enough bandwidth to send a data stream from a video camera over a wireless link and extract scene features remotely," said Christian Enz, vice president of the Microelectronics Group at CSEM. "But with our chip set, you can extract all the information locally and just send the results over a very low-data rate wireless transceiver like Bluetooth."

Traditional video camera solutions send high-bandwidth raw video data over a hard wire to a high-performance image processing chip, then run algorithms that compare successive frames of an image stream to detect contrast, draw outlines and recognize objects. The ViSe chip does all the image processing in circuitry that surrounds each pixel on the chip, sending the results of the algorithms to an inexpensive application processor like the Blackfin.