OPPO, AlpsenTek and Qualcomm Boost AI Motion, Image Quality For Mobile Apps 

OPPO, AlpsenTek and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have teamed up with the goal of enhancing innovative Hybrid Vision Sensing (HVS) technology, to better extracting valuable motion and image data to enhance picture quality for mobile phone applications.

OPPO and AlpsenTek will collaborate to pioneer the use of Hybrid Vision Sensing technologies, developing a data processing chain to collect relevant camera information to help enhance picture quality and allow for deblurring, augmented resolution, and slow-motion reconstruction, as well as other features required for machine sensing. This will be accomplished by leveraging Snapdragon^® Mobile Platforms from Qualcomm Technologies.

“Vision sensors are now expected to provide additional data such as distance, spectrum, and motion on top of 2D color information,” said Jian Deng, Founder and CEO of AlpsenTek.

AlpsenTek introduced Hybrid Vision Sensing (HVS) technology in 2019, combining event-based Vision Sensing (EVS) with conventional CIS technology to create the ALPIX^® sensor. This allows the best of both worlds, obtaining the high-fidelity motion information that is crucial for photography and machine vision at a lower cost.

“Together with OPPO, we designed the ALPIX-Eiger^® to seamlessly integrate into mobile phone applications and worked with Qualcomm Technologies to optimize on Snapdragon. It produces image quality comparable to leading mobile sensors with the added functionality of EVS. Developing this technology, from its original conceptual stage, into an actual product is very exciting,” Deng added.

The ALPIX^® sensor supplies high-quality RGB images with a simultaneous EVS data stream, providing a cost-effective and algorithm-friendly solution to capture images with embedded motion information.

“The HVS solution, with the support of hardware and algorithms, significantly enhances the capacities of smartphone cameras,” said Judd Heape VP, Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are pleased to contribute to the optimization of this new technology on our Snapdragon platforms – which will help consumers get the best performance from their smartphone cameras, and capture what’s most precious to them.”

HVS retains the benefits of traditional CMOS image sensors, which provides images and vision details. Meanwhile, thanks to the addition of an event data channel, it can avoid issues like redundant data accumulation and high resource consumption, and better adapt to poorer lighting environments for motion information. All these benefits come without being saddled with costs, system complexity and the need for image registration.

“We are confident towards the potential of HVS technology, investing time and effort into refining it through numerous iterations in both chip design and algorithms in collaboration with the partners, with the ultimate aim of seeing its application on OPPO’s HyperTone Camera System,” said according to the Image Product Director, Mr. Xuan ZHANG, of OPPO.