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Rambus lensless smart sensors win “Best Of” MWC 2015 award from Tom’s Hardware

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Tom’s Hardware has announced that Rambus lensless smart sensors (LSS) won the publication’s “Best Of” (hardware) award for Mobile World Congress 2015. It should be noted that Rambus LSS technology clinched the “Best of MWC” award from Tom’s Guide in 2014.

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Designed by Rambus scientists, LSS is roughly analogous to the way a human, animal or insect brain perceives the world: the real-time interpretation of a scene or object facilitated by inherent pattern recognition capabilities.

“Essentially, this means data leaving a human retina looks nothing at all like a map of light intensity, although it does contain all the information required to interpret an image,” LSS co-inventor Patrick Gill told Rambus Press.

“Similarly, LSS allows sensors to capture information-rich images using a low-cost phase grating. Even though the raw ‘snap’ is indecipherable to the naked human eye, the sensor, which is approximately the size of pinhead and as thin as a human hair, is capable of capturing all of the information in the visual world up to a certain resolution.”

According to Gill, the spiral grating of LSS diffractive optics (hardware), coupled with sophisticated computational algorithms (software), effectively reduces computation time while facilitating application-specific design flexibility.

“Computation is pushed past the ‘edge’ and performed on the LSS sensors themselves. However, unlike traditional PIR sensors that are only capable of detecting a general event such as motion, LSS algorithms can be tailored to monitor and even ‘decipher’ what is being captured,” he explained.

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“In addition, LSS delivers more data (128 bits x 128 pixels versus two bits x two pixels), along with improved accuracy. In practical terms, this enables near infinite depth-of-field and eliminates the need for autofocus.”

Lensless smart sensor technology garnered significant attention from analysts, journalists and industry experts after Rambus officially kicked off its (LSS) POD (Partners in Open Development) program in Barcelona, Spain.

“Individuals and companies designing sensors for the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) are often forced to code complex algorithms from the ground up,” Kendra De Berti, a director at Rambus, told us on the sidelines of MWC 2015. “Our POD program will offer partners early access to LSS hardware along with optimized algorithms.”

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As part of the POD initiative, Rambus, along with partners MLove and IXDS, hosted 4YFN’s MWC 2015 “Eyes of the IoT” workshop at MWC 2015. Participants discussed how smart vision facilitated by LSS technology could potentially impact the future of smart cities, medical equipment, transportation and manufacturing.

In addition, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel participated in 4YFN’s MWC panel discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), Rambus lensless smart sensors and the evolution of smart cities.

As Nadel told a packed audience, disruptive innovation is often contrarian.

“We need to think beyond the mobile status quo to a brave new future four years from now when ubiquitous intelligent sensors positively redefine human interaction with technology and our surroundings,” Nadel concluded. “Let’s work towards creating adaptable smart cities that empower residents by melding the physical world with the digital realm.”

Interested in learning more about the technology behind Rambus lensless smart sensors? You can check out our LSS article archive here.

Special purpose eyes and lensless smart sensors (LSS)

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Written by LSS co-inventor Dr. Patrick Gill

Human eyes – and perhaps more importantly our brains – offer such a high degree of general-purpose visual object recognition and spatial awareness that it’s difficult to imagine them doing anything but relaying a coherent picture of objects.

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But imagine if you were a scallop. You would be spending much of your day on the sea floor filter feeding, all while desperately trying to avoid being nipped by a passing fish. Unfortunately, even a visual system capable of recognizing specific objects might not be enough to save you. In fact, the neural hardware needed to tell a hawk from a handsaw probably doesn’t fit in your compact shell. Still, that hungry rock cod is speeding towards you, so some sort of sensor is clearly needed to warn of its impending approach.

Fortunately, you are equipped with dozens of special-purpose eyes that are almost unique in the animal kingdom. To be sure, your string of eyes employ a reflecting curved mirror, a configuration strikingly similar to an astronomical telescope. They also only have one primary job: to alert you when some hungry creature is approaching.

However, rather than having a brain with enough visual horsepower to recognize the predatory fish, you possess an optical sensor tasked with focusing light onto a few photosensitive cells, which in turn fire off an alarm whenever a dark object a couple of degrees across approaches. Your optical alarm then goes off and you close your shell.

Similar to the scallop, many future smart digital devices will not need to be capable of performing general-purpose object recognition. Think of it this way: much like the scallop, your toaster probably doesn’t really need to see, at least not in the conventional human sense.

Nevertheless, a wireless Internet of Things (IoT) node should be capable of detecting an individual’s approach with minimal hardware, low (compute) power and at a higher resolution than a motion sensor such as a PIR detector. Pairing an IoT node with a lensless smart sensor to detect visual changes could potentially fit this requirement.

Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless smart sensors (LSS)? You can check out our article archive here.

What makes a lensless sensor “smart?”

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Rambus Fellow and Research Director Dr. David Stork recently spoke with Smithers Apex about lensless smart sensor (LSS) technology on the sidelines of the Image Sensors 2015 conference in the United Kingdom.

According to Stork, Rambus lensless smart sensors consist of special optical phase gratings affixed to standard CMOS image sensor arrays.

“Light from the scene diffracts through the grating and yields an apparently chaotic and unintelligible blob on the sensor array—appearing nothing like a familiar image in a traditional camera,” Stork told the publication.

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“The grating preserves nearly all the visual information from the scene, up to the two-dimensional Nyquist limit, and thus the blob on the sensor can be processed with special algorithms to yield the final digital image.”

In short, says Stork, the grating produces an image “blob” on the sensor array that is meant for computers, rather than humans. Indeed, unlike traditional cameras, lensless smart sensors compute an image using special algorithms.

He adds, “We view the gratings less as an optical device and more as a computational device, that is, one that transforms the information from the scene into a representation on the sensor appropriate for the sensing task at hand. The grating performs its ‘computation’ in parallel, unbelievably fast (the time it takes for light to pass through the thin grating) and not merely at low electrical power, but instead at zero electrical power. Our challenge as sensor designers is to make the grating do as much of the total computation as possible, leaving the digital algorithms to finish the task.”

As Stork notes, there are a myriad of potential applications for small, flat, inexpensive sensors and imagers such as LSS. Specific examples include adding simple vision to mobile devices and appliances, toys, in the internet of things (IoT); simple human interfaces based on gestures or other visual information; biomedical sensing such as endoscopy; and automotive sensors for collision avoidance.

“Some of the best applications for our technology will be identified by others who have unique requirements [that are] hard to meet using traditional sensing methods [for] tasks such as image change detection, visual flow estimation, face detection, object tracking, people counting and so on,” he explained.

“[That being said], I’m particularly intrigued and encouraged by our most recent work on designing gratings and subsequent digital processing to address particular image sensing tasks such as image change detection, visual flow estimation, face detection, object tracking [and] people counting.”

Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless smart sensor technology? You can check out our LSS article archive here.
 

Building smart cities with intelligent sensors

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Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel recently participated in 4YFN’s MWC 2015 panel discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensors and the evolution of smart cities. Additional 4YFN panelists included Cisco CTO John Baekelmans, MLOVE Founder and Curator Harald Neidhardt, Intel Human Computer Interaction Expert Mara Balestrini, D4SC Designer-Founder Priya Prakash and Digitel director Amitai Gindel.

Envisioning an intelligent future with Rambus lensless smart sensors (LSS)

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Rambus, along with partners MLove and IXDS, hosted 4YFN’s “Eyes of the IoT” MWC 2015 workshop this afternoon in Barcelona, Spain. Participants discussed how smart vision, facilitated by technology such as Rambus’ lensless smart sensors (LSS), could potentially impact the future of smart cities, medical equipment, transportation and manufacturing.

Building smart cities with intelligent sensors

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Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel recently participated in 4YFN’s MWC 2015 panel discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensors and the evolution of smart cities.

Additional 4YFN panelists included Cisco CTO John Baekelmans, MLOVE Founder and Curator Harald Neidhardt, Intel Human Computer Interaction Expert Mara Balestrini, D4SC Designer-Founder Priya Prakash and Digitel director Amitai Gindel.

Nadel, who attended his first MWC in 2000, kicked off the panel by describing how the mobile industry has evolved over the years.

“Historically, the definition of mobile was limited to devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, there has been a paradigm industry shift, with connected endpoints acting as the new mobile,” Nadel explained.

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“Although new mobile offers almost limitless opportunities for innovation, it does pose a significant challenge on the security side. For IoT to become a reality, we need to make sure vulnerable endpoints are safe from hacks by implementing security at the silicon level to provide a reliable root of trust.”

Once the endpoints are secure, says Nadel, the industry can create near ubiquitous intelligent endpoints based on small, inexpensive and low-powered sensors such as Rambus’ lenless smart sensors (LSS).

As Nadel notes, LSS technology will allow sensors to capture information-rich images using a low-cost phase grating. Although the raw ‘snap’ is indecipherable to the naked human eye, the sensor, which is approximately the size of pinhead, is capable of capturing all of the information in the visual world up to a certain resolution.

“Disruptive innovation is contrarian and we need think beyond the mobile status quo to a brave new future four years from now when ubiquitous intelligent sensors positively redefine human interaction with technology and our surroundings,” Nadel concluded. “Let’s work towards creating adaptable smart cities that empower residents by melding the physical world with the digital realm.”

Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless sensor technology (LSS)? You can check out our article archive here.

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