Freescale partners CogniVue to Enable Smart Cameras for Mainstream Vehicles

reescale plans to offer new processors that bring Image Cognition Processing to automotive cameras later this year. Freescale licensed CogniVue’s APEX IP to enable vehicle cameras to sense the environment – determining the presence of an object and identifying it.

“Advanced driver assistance systems are becoming more and more sophisticated. And, while ADAS are already included on many luxury vehicle models, there is increasing demand to include them on higher-volume mainstream vehicles,” said Ray Cornyn, vice president of Freescale's Automotive MCU Division. “Today’s collision avoidance systems are typically enabled by digital signal processors or field-programmable gate arrays. Freescale is taking a different approach by integrating CogniVue’s Image Cognition Processing IP into our processors, providing massively parallel processing in small packages and with very low power consumption.”

CogniVue’s APEX Image Cognition IP

CogniVue offers fully programmable, parallel processing IP for intelligent imaging. Its products capture, analyze and render video and images for smart cameras used in automotive vision systems and smart video monitoring markets. In addition to capturing image and video information, CogniVue’s APEX technology enables extraction of application-specific information from a scene and interpreting the image data to make decisions or take actions based on the extracted data. With pattern recognition, detection and classification algorithms, smart cameras can detect objects and people around the vehicle and measure distance to alert the driver of an impending collision.

“With this exclusive combination of CogniVue’s unmatched imaging technology and Freescale’s automotive semiconductor expertise, automotive OEMs will be able to bring smart cameras to market quickly and cost-effectively,” said Simon Morris, CEO of CogniVue Corporation. “Freescale selected our APEX IP because of the cost/performance/size benefits it brings – they are able to do more with less die area and with lower power than other solutions available today.”