The members of this consortium aim to reshape the market of “3D imaging and sensing” cameras for mobile telephony, a new market started in 2016 and according to Wooside Capital partners is expected to reach volumes of 712 million units and revenues of $ 6000 million by 2022 (Smartphone Depth Sensing report). Our face recognition depth camera constitutes a major scientific breakthrough in smartphone cameras that together with the wafer level manufacturing techniques used for the ad-hoc lens and the unique highly automated alignment and mounting techniques developed in this project improve the “innovation capacity strengthening the competitiveness and scale-up of the industrial partners of the consortium”.
PhotonicSENS has access and fully exploits the scientific and technological capacity from NILT (advanced wafer optics) and ficonTEC (world-class manufacturing processes and machines). NILT and ficonTEC enjoy the product innovation capacity from photonicSENS, likely to become one of the best customers with the results from this project. These synergies “improve the innovation capacity” of the 3 partners in a more effective way than working in isolation, very effectively “strengthening the competitiveness and scale-up of the industrial partners in the consortium”.
The main needs identified from our direct users (manufacturers of mobile phones) are to provide a reliable Depth map with more pixels than competition at lower costs and with low requirements in terms of computing power (as well as specific image formats, image quality, physical buses, standards and regulatory issues. Our solution provides 1.45 Megapixels depth maps while other suppliers of the mobile pone industry can only offer 40 Kpixels (our depth maps are 36 times better), and we do it at 50% of the cost of their Bill of Materials. We achieve this by using a single CMOS image sensor with ad-hoc optics and algorithms while our competitors need at least two components: InfraRed camera(s) and InfraRed Transmitter(s). This will allow our customers to offer more reliable face recognition, which is becoming an important biometric identification feature to secure online payments as a second identity check in addition to fingerprint sensing, and much more secure (especially if we increase the number of megapixels in the depth map). We will also enable our customers to outcompete other solutions by offering better applications in mixed reality (merging graphics into real world images), facial morphing, gesture recognition and avatars that react in real-time face movements, besides additional functions like all-in-focus images and advanced Bokeh effects (images unfocused at the background, at the foreground or at any depth range decided by the user).
