Learn more: https://www.prophesee.ai/2019/07/28/e...

Inspired by human vision, Prophesee’s Metavision technology uses a patented sensor design and AI algorithms that mimic the eye and brain to reveal what was invisible until now using standard image-based technology.

Prophesee’s machine vision systems open new potential in areas such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, IoT, security and surveillance, and AR/VR. One early application was in medical devices that restore vision to the blind.

Prophesee’s technology is fundamentally different from the traditional image sensors – it introduces a paradigm shift in computer vision: Event-Based Vision.

Since their inception 150 years ago, all conventional video tools have represented motion by capturing a number of still frames each second. Displayed rapidly, such images create an illusion of continuous movement. From the flip book to the movie camera, the illusion became more convincing but its basic structure never really changed.

For a computer, this representation of motion is of little use. The camera is blind between each frame, losing information on moving objects. Even when the camera is recording, each of its “snapshot” images contains no information about the motion of elements in the scene. Worse still, within each image, the same irrelevant background objects are repeatedly recorded, generating excessive unhelpful data.

Evolution developed an elegant solution so that natural vision never encounters these problems. It doesn’t take frames. Cells in our eyes report back to the brain when they detect a change in the scene – an event. If nothing changes, the cell doesn’t report anything. The more an object moves, the more our eye and brain sample it.

This is the founding principle behind Event-Based Vision – independent receptors collecting all the essential information, and nothing else.

Prophesee creates both neuromorphic sensors and bio-inspired algorithms that function like the eye and brain. This holistic approach is a fundamental shift in computer vision – the departure from frame-based sensors, to event-based vision systems, also known as event cameras.

Each pixel only reports when it senses movement. Whereas in a frame-based sensor all pixels record at the same time, in an event-based sensor each pixel is perfectly independent.

Credits: La belle Société Production