Disruptive Sensors for Environment Perception made possible through collaboration between Sony and Prophesee.
Chatou/France, 23 November 2021. Macnica ATD Europe today announced to offer
the Event-based vision sensor (“EVS”) from its long-term distribution partner, Sony
Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (“Sony”). The two sensors IMX636 and IMX637
were made possible through collaboration between Sony and Prophesee, another
distribution partner of Macnica ATD Europe.
EVS realizes high-speed data output with low latency by limiting the output data to
luminance changes from each pixel, combined with information on pixel position
coordinates and time. Only the pixels that have detected a change in luminance for
the object can output data, allowing the sensor to immediately detect the luminance
changes with high-speed, low-latency, high-temporal-resolution while operating with
low power consumption. It represents a whole new approach compared to the
commonly used frame-based method, where the entire image is output at certain
intervals determined by the frame rate.
Application fields where the two new models of EVS specifically exploit their
advantages over frame-based sensors are for example sensing changes in sparks
produced during welding and metal cutting; and sensing slight changes in vibration and detecting abnormalities for use in predictive maintenance.
Macnica ATD Europe as a prime distribution partner of both Sony and Prophesee
covers the full cooperation on the EVS technology and offers technical support as
well as the free loan of evaluation kits in different versions from first “hands on”
evaluation to full performance evaluation (available in Q4). The cooperation also
covers the Metavision® Intelligence Suite from Prophesee, an event signal
processing software optimized for the sensors performance, which is available
through Macnica ATD Europe. Combining Sony’s event-based vision sensors with
this software will enable efficient application development and provide solutions for
various use cases.