Prophesee has won this year’s Vision Award for its neuromorphic processor. The prize, presented at Vision Stuttgart today, recognises innovation in machine vision.
Prophesee is making great strides with its event-based sensing, which operates differently to frame-based approaches.
Martin Wäny of the judging panel called event-based vision a 'new paradigm' in imaging technology, one that's been worked on for 20 years, but is now coming to fruition through the efforts of Prophesee.
At the show, the firm announced that Lucid Vision Labs was the latest camera manufacturer to develop an event-based camera based on Prophesee’s Metavision sensor. Lucid joins Imago and Century Arks as machine vision camera suppliers offering this technology.
In addition, a few weeks ago, Sony released VGA and HD event-based sensors using Prophesee’s technology, which will open up neuromorphic imaging still further. The Sony sensors have a pixel pitch of 4.86μm.
Event-based sensors record changes in the scene, rather than capturing the entire scene frame by frame as with traditional approaches. They asynchronously detect luminance changes for each pixel and output the changed data. This is combined with information on pixel position (xy coordinates) and time, thereby enabling high-speed, low latency data output.
Neuromorphic sensors capture up to 1,000 times fewer data than a conventional sensor, while achieving a higher equivalent temporal resolution of 10,000 fps.
Luca Verre, Prophesee’s CEO, explained during the award session that the firm’s first success was using its sensor in a medical trial for the partial recovery of visual function in a blind patient.
Imaging and Machine Vision Europe sponsors the €3,000 award, and Warren Clark, our publishing director, gave his congratulations to Prophesee remotely during a session presenting the four companies shortlisted for the award.
The Austrian Institute of Technology, HD Vision Systems and Zeiss were shortlisted by the judges from a total of 44 submissions.
