SemiSerious

I am in London this week and just wrapped things up at the Intertech-Pira Image Sensor Conference. It was an interesting event with a diverse programme. There was everything from cameraphones to disposable endoscopes to swarms of robotic surveillance insects. Wait. The bugs were just my own nutty comment lifted from IEEE Spectrum. After a day where a single conference session dealt with both cameraphones and tiny cameras placed on the ends of laproscopic surgical instruments, Technology Review was very timely with their news of a cameraphone microscope.

But there was more to the conference than pictures of internal organs (right before lunch, thank you) and discussions of better ways of yanking gall bladders out through small pipes stuck into people.

What was hot? Well HDR - or high dynamic range - was. However, the definition of HDR was nowhere near consensus. HDR capability will be required in both security cameras as well as forward looking driver assistance cameras for cars. The other technology worth watching is backside illuminated imagers. Although it was not a featured topic in a session or even a single paper, it did pop up again in a few interesting places. I got turned onto the backside idea for the first time at IISW last May. Although it was introduced to me relatively recently, it’s been under investigation for a long time. Now it seems like it is picking up some momentum inside image sensor companies and starting to be considered for a potential production technology.

Sensors were not the only interesting discussion. Day two offered everything from the use of Flickr in image enhancement algorithms to shape memory alloys.

Graham Townsend, founder of Spiral Gateway, presented an interesting alternative to ASIC-based  Image Signal Processors (ISP). His team’s “soft” ISP approach avoids the 12 to 18 months lead time to get image processing algorithms hardwired into silicon. The obvious advantage is that the latest algorithms developed can be used in the cameraphone right as it goes into production, and they can be changed even after product launch simply by compiling new C code. Their chip is only slightly larger than a full custom ASIC providing the same processing (16 versus 14 square millimetres including I/O). The idea is based on RICA or re-configurable instruction cell array. Although I know virtually nothing about this architecture or other microprocessor alternatives, I would say the ISP application is only the tip of the iceberg. I can only explain it by borrowing one of Graham’s bullet points - ASIC netlists, wired up ‘on-demand’ in real time. (By the way, the iceberg analogy is quiteappropriate considering that co-chair, Lindsay Grant introduced Townsend by saying that Graham often referred to CMOS image sensors and imaging 10 years ago as just the tip of another iceberg.)

The shape memory alloys are being used by a company called 1…Limited to move the lens in an autofocus system. The alloy wire takes up almost no space (diameter is only 25 microns) inside the module providing space for larger lenses inside smaller modules. The next application of their wire is for adding zoom to future cameraphones.

Professor Raimondo Schettini from the University of Milano (Bicocca) gave an intriguing lecture on image enhancement techniques. These are more than the simple enhancements like automatic face detection or red-eye reduction that are so well known. His group has developed several algorithms for improving images based on decision trees to determine if the image is indoor or outdoor and so on to select the best algorithm based on determining the context in which the photograph was captured. A very interesting extension of that idea was the use of the web and the growing set of not only posted images but also user comments. This is visionary stuff. And I’m not just saying that because  my own presentation suggested that Google Street View might create the next image sensor boom! Professor Schettini intends to use the vast database available on Flickr to selectively apply algorithms to improve the image quality. As one slide pointed out, this is truly “data mining on all the available data.”
 
After IISW last May, this was my second chance to attend a relatively small meeting of image sensor technologists (and marketers as the case was this week). What I have discovered is that image sensor experts are not only extremely talented in their various fields but also a distinctly fun and classy group of people. I think there is a unique level of understanding within the imaging community that each sub-specialty represents only one part of a complex system that creates a final image and that all of the system components in delivering the final product are equally important.

Now an anecdote…I have a long and strange history of people getting my name wrong. I thought “Don” was pretty simple. I don’t know why, but the telephone company has listed me more than once as “Dan.” People I’ve met even several times often prefer “Dan” as well, but I thought everything would be okay here in London. I hoped I would come to a conference with my name correctly indicated in the programme (it was), give out some business cards with my name spelled properly (it was), and show a title slide with my name shown clearly as “Don,” and people would get it right. But I guess my parents were the ones who got it wrong. Within about 90 minutes of presenting yesterday, I was sitting at the same lunch table as an attendee who referred to me as “Dan the Insights guy.” I hope it doesn’t stick.

That’s all for Dan from London. (Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…)

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