Smart cities. The term is everywhere. Across technology media to every vertical from transport to engineering, everyone wants to talk about smart cities. And it’s not hard to see why. When you say the words, you can’t help but find the imagination go into overdrive, building and piecing together exciting scenes from every sci-fi film you have seen, leaving you with an idea a thousand light years from the comparatively dull surroundings you find yourself in. The only problem is that the reality of smart cities is a lot more complex, and like contemporary cities, there are thousands of parts that make up the whole. One of the most interesting technologies that can enable smart cities may be lensless smart sensors (LSS).
Lensless Smart Sensors
Rambus Prototypes 2x2mm Lens-Less Eye Tracker for Headmount Displays
PARIS—At last week’s VLSI Symposia, Rambus presented a poster titled “Lensless Smart Sensors: Optical and Thermal Sensing for the Internet of Things” in which the company not only detailed the underlying technology but also demonstrated a working sensor prototype. The Lensless Smart Sensors (LSS) rely on a phase anti-symmetric diffraction grating (either tuned for optical or IR thermal sensing) mounted directly on top of a conventional imaging array and co-designed with computational algorithms that extract the relevant information from the scene to be imaged. The grating is very thin and boasts a wide field of view, up to 120º, and the resulting imaging sensor is almost flat (only a few hundred micrometres separate the grating from the image sensor).
These are the invisible cameras of the future
Hidden cameras are getting harder to spot: old, hefty spy gadgets you had to hide under a thick coat have been replaced tiny devices in the tips of pens that live stream HD video. Soon, thanks to new tech, spycams could even be entirely invisible.
Sensors Enable ADAS
Advanced driver assistance requires a careful and complex balance of hardware, software and security.
Smartphone camera performance: What does the sensor’s megapixel count really tell you?
Digital camera and smartphone marketing often highlights the number of pixels on the camera sensor on the basis that big numbers are good, and huge numbers are even better. The resolving power of the lens is never mentioned
RIoT @ MWC: The hardware roundup
Imagination Technologies, a veteran GPU designer and the new owner of the low-power processor architecture MIPS, launched the G6020 at MWC – a GPU that is intended to serve the low-power requirements needed for devices in the wearables and IoT markets.