French company Prophesee is promising that blurred mobile phone photos will become a thing of the past, with a new technology it has been developing with chip giant Qualcomm.
The Metavision deblur system uses a secondary event camera sensor that can create pinsharp images of fast-moving subjects, even in total darkness. The sensor uses a new kind of pixel that only records when its sense change of movement - and does so continuously, unlike a traditional sensor that only records a limited number of times a second.
The magic then happens by synchronizing this event-based camera sensor with the image from a normal RGB sensor. This then uses AI to eliminate the blur that you would get with the a normal camera. The Metavision system is said to give you the motion-stopping capability of a 10,000 frame-per-second camera.
Prophecy has been working with Qualcomm for the last year and, at MWC 2024, has announced that it is now ready to go into production - adding the Metavision shake-busting technology to the latest generation of Android handsets using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor.
“We have made significant progress since we announced this collaboration in February 2023, achieving the technical milestones that demonstrate the impressive impact on image quality our event-based technology has in mobile devices containing Snapdragon mobile platforms. As a result, our Metavision Deblur solution has now reached production readiness,” said Luca Verre, CEO and co-founder of Prophesee. “We look forward to unleashing the next generation of Smartphone's photography and video with Prophesee's Metavision.”
