Car manufacturer Porsche is investing in Israeli company TriEye, developer of camera systems for adaptive driving assistance systems. TriEye will use the money to further develop its product and grow both its company and team.
TriEye is a company that sets itself the goal of solving low visibility challenges for adaptive driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. For this purpose, the company has developed SWIR sensor technology, which gives vehicles good visibility even under difficult challenges. SWIR stands for Short Wave Infra-Red and is the spectrum between 1 and 1.9um. In comparison, standard cameras typically film et 0.4 to 0.75um, while Near Infra-Red (NIR) cameras film 0.75 to 1um.
CMOS-based sensor
A striking feature of TriEye's technology is the use of a CMOS-based sensor. Instead, most SWIR cameras are based on an InGaAs sensor. InGaAs is a material that is difficult to produce and therefore expensive. A low-resolution InGaAs SWIR camera therefore quickly costs around 20,000 euros, TriEye reports.
CMOS sensors are significantly cheaper, which makes using such a sensor in a SWIR camera interesting. At the same time, CMOS sensors offer high resolution and have low power consumption. The sensor is also small, scalable and, according to TriEye, reliable. Based on this CMOS sensor, TriEye has the Raven image sensor, which combines short-wave infrared with a CMOS-based sensor.
TriEye Raven
Based on this CMOS sensor, the company has developed the TriEye Raven. With this SWIR camera, TriEye aims to make cost-effective, high-resolution images accessible to make adaptive driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles safer and more reliable. The camera enables systems to have good visibility even during the night or in bad weather conditions.
The system can be integrated into existing adaptive driver assistance systems and the architecture of autonomous vehicles. The camera system can also be combined with existing computer vision algorithms. These integration capabilities simplify the implementation of the TriEye Raven cameras in vehicles.
Some specifications of the TriEye Raven camera include:
- Image range (horizontal x vertical): 17°x12° or 46°x34°
- Resolution (horizontal x vertical): 1280×960 pixels
- Aspect ratio: 4:3
- Frame rate: 30 fps
- Dimensions (height x width x depth): 3x3x2.5 cm, excluding lens
- Output: GMSL II/FPD LINK III
- IP Code: IP68
Investors
How much money Porsche is putting into TriEye is not known. What is clear, however, is that the company raised a total of $19 million during the investment round in which Porsche also participated. The company plans to use this money to further develop its product and grow its team.
The investment round was announced by TriEye in May. Intel's investment arm Intel Capital, investment firm Grove Ventures and Israeli businessman Marius Nacht have also put money into TriEye. Grove Ventures also put $3 million into TriEye in 2017.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
