CEVA has announced that it entered into a strategic partnership agreement with privately owned Immervision, of Montreal, Canada. A developer and licensor of wide-angle lenses and image processing technologies, Immervision’s patented image enhancement algorithms and software technologies deliver dramatic improvements in image quality and remove the inherent distortions associated with the use of wide-angle cameras, particularly at the edges of the frame.
Immervision’s technologies have shipped in more than 50 million devices to date through its broad customer base, which includes Acer, Dahua, Garmin, Hanwha, Lenovo, Motorola, Quanta, Sony and Vivotek.
Under the partnership agreement, CEVA made a $10m technology investment to secure exclusive licensing rights to Immervision’s advanced portfolio of patented wide-angle image processing technology and software. This includes real-time adaptive dewarping, stitching, image color and contrast enhancement, and electronic image stabilization.
CEVA will also license Immervision’s Data-in-Picture proprietary technology, which integrates within each video frame fused sensory data, such as that offered by Hillcrest Labs (a business recently acquired by CEVA). This adds contextual information to each frame that enables better image quality, video stabilization and accurate machine vision in AI applications.
The companies will also collaborate in licensing full end-to-end solutions comprised of Immervision’s patented wide-angle Panomorph optical lens design and the complementary image enhancement software.
Immervision’s hardware-agnostic software portfolio will continue to be offered for all System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms containing a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and in a power-optimized version for SoCs containing the CEVA-XM4 or CEVA-XM6 intelligent vision DSPs. Along with Immervision’s software, CEVA also offers a broad range of other computer vision and AI software technologies, such as the CEVA Deep Neural Network (CDNN) – a neural networks graph compiler, the CEVA-SLAM software development kit, and the CEVA-CV optimized computer vision software library.
Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of CEVA, commented: “This strategic partnership and technology investment with Immervision provides CEVA with a significant market advantage for the fast growing wide-angle camera market, particularly in smartphones, surveillance, ADAS and robotics. Through the combination of Immervision’s imaging technologies and CEVA’s vision and AI software technologies, we are lowering the entry barriers for semiconductor providers and OEM customers into this lucrative, yet complex, technology space.
“As the innovator of the Panomorph lens technology, which offers superior image quality over the traditional fisheye lens for wide-angle cameras, Immervision is an excellent partner to expand our offering and royalty potential in the smart sensing space.”
Pascal Nini, CEO of Immervision, added: “Immervision is delighted to partner with CEVA, a technology leader with a strong presence in the smart camera space. CEVA’s partnership enables us to further innovate our Panomorph lens and imaging technologies, and to capitalize on CEVA’s market channels, global sales and support offices.
“Beyond accelerating our penetration and growth in key markets, this partnership also presents a great opportunity to build innovation in deep seeing. CEVA’s DSP and AI processor portfolio and Immervision’s new AI algorithms will unleash the power of wide-angle intelligent vision at the edge.”
