Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

Night-sight: Competing technologies for the vision systems in autonomous vehicles

Infrared, lidar, and time-of-flight imaging offer hope in solving one of the industry’s toughest challenges

By Ha Lan Do Thu, Marketing Manager for 3D imaging at Teledyne e2v

It’s nighttime. You’re driving. A Chuck Berry song enters your mind: New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours / Rolling slowly because of drizzling showers.

But, are you rolling slowly enough?

At night, the average vehicle high beams can illuminate about 400 feet, far less in inclement weather. And, if you’re traveling at a conservative 55 mph—80 feet per second—that means it will take you about 170 feet to stop once you apply your brakes. But, the average driver will travel 120 feet before the brakes are applied. There’s not much margin for error, and if you’re driving less conservatively, you better hope that deer moves before you reach it.

But, perhaps you’re driving a car of more recent vintage. A nice one. Something German, maybe. It has night vision, so you think you’re safe. Are you?

Read the full article here.

Has 3D Finally Come of Age?

Has 3D finally come of age?

By Ha Lan Do Thu, Marketing Manager and Pierre Fereyre, Sr. Principal Engineer Image Sensor Design

If you looked only at the movie industry, you could be forgiven for thinking that 3D was a failure. Repeatedly, 3D has been promoted as the next big thing in movies, only for it to fade within months of its last showing. In the perhaps less glamourous world of machine vision, where 3D imaging remains several years behind 2D in terms of image quality, rendering, and ease of use (despite the hype and financial successes to date) it is seeing a resurgence for a growing number of applications. In this post, we will provide some background for four popular techniques for 3D imaging.

Read the full article here.

Behind bars – a technological overview of the most pervasive of coding systems

Being ubiquitous in industry hasn’t stopped barcode reader makers from innovating.

By Gareth Powell, Strategic Marketing Manager at Teledyne e2v

Even with the holidays behind us (the seasonal peak in consumer retail/on-line spending, logistics and transport, manufacturing, and distribution), there are still more than 5 billion barcodes are scanned every day. Considering that the first barcode was scanned in the 70s on a packet of chewing gum, it’s clearly a formidable method of providing machine-readable UPC (Universal Product Code) that has evolved relatively little since. The systems that identify and decode barcodes on the other hand have come a long way and continue to advance to offer faster, smaller, cheaper and more robust readers.

Read the full article here.