January 14 2022

Imaging is at the Forefront of a Significant Transition

Paul K. Gallagher, Vice-President of Strategic Marketing at Airy3D

The primary focus of image capture technologies have been focused on capturing a moment for a person to view, store, share or revisit. This has driven the focus on image capture to initially provide an image that mimics the scene as closely as what the user was viewing, and now is to actually present a representation of the scene that is better than the eye, or to ‘pretty pictures’. While the pretty picture image capture sockets continue to grow, the fundamentals of their platforms are stagnant or in decline, this growth issue will catch up to the image capture segments in a few years. However, a potentially much more significant set of use cases is just starting to emerge, these applications are based on understanding what is in the scene, and from that understanding then controlling actuators or other electronics to respond, in most cases these images will never be seen by a person. These markets have the potential to be as large or larger than the ‘pretty picture’ markets, but are currently hamstrung by image capture solutions that are still focused on presenting the most pleasing picture to a person. This presentation will review the status of the image capture market, as well as discuss opportunities being addressed by solutions that present image data in formats better suited for processors to deal with, rather than a person to view.