Imagia
Assembly Line
Imagia announces ‘breakthrough’ in optical feature detection
Imagia, a developer of optical metasurface technology, has announced a “breakthrough” that allows for optically-accelerated feature detection, enabling image processing operations without power consumption or code.
The new technology, called Processing Optics™, allows for the identification of complex features like a human hand or face by means of an array of microscopic optical filters rather than standard, algorithmic on chip image processing. For power-limited and latency-critical applications like edge computing on wearable devices, the ability to extract features of interest quickly and efficiently presents an immense opportunity to enable AI applications at the edge and push the boundaries of device design.
“Processing Optics is a step change in the way we think about extracting information from the world around us,” commented Greg Kress, CEO of Imagia. “Searching for objects or patterns within images has traditionally been a slow and computationally intensive task. Now, we get the signal we want at the speed of light, for very little power.”
The technology works by applying a set of mathematical convolutions in an array of optical filters. The light passing through a metalens is steered and transformed by billions of nanoscale components on each Imagia metalens that imparts a hard-coded pattern recognition algorithm to the signal. Imagia has demonstrated a hand and gesture detector that works with only eight pixels of information and with a response time of only 80 microseconds. By contrast, traditional optics and processing typically take 30-40 milliseconds to process the millions of pixels for digital algorithmic approaches.
By processing the image directly in the optics, Imagia is able to realize a 500x reduction in detection latency for a fraction of the power compared to the traditional method of capturing an image and then processing that data in downstream software. Running at a comparable frame rate to a standard image processing system, the Imagia solution consumes less than 1% of the power.
Applications like artificial intelligence and active feature detection in laptops and AR/VR headsets are set to receive outsized benefit from the innovation, which could extend battery life of these devices by 20% or more.