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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – July 21, 2004 – The world's first workshop to explore electronic perception technology and its growing number of uses attracted over 100 scientists from around the globe, reported Canesta, Inc., a pioneer in electronic perception technology. The workshop — held recently at the IEEE Computer Society's Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2004) that took place in Washington, DC — was organized by scientists from Canesta and several other organizations. Companies represented included Hewlett-Packard, Adobe, Honda, Microsoft, NASA, and others.
The goals of the workshop were to explore key enabling hardware and software advances in the emerging field of electronic perception technology and real time 3-D sensors and their use, and to raise awareness of the new applications that become possible when everyday devices can "see". Showcased were advances from Canesta, universities, think tanks, and major corporations that enable the creation of low-cost, high-accuracy, real-time 3-D sensors and processing software that have a small footprint — and for real time applications — a high frame rate.
Electronic perception technology has been used to create projection keyboards, where finger movements on a flat surface are interpreted as keystrokes by a PDA or similar device projecting a keyboard "in thin air", and numerous other applications are being evaluated or developed.
The workshop included the presentation of over a dozen formal papers covering topics including "High Resolution, Real-Time Dynamic 3-D Shape Acquisition," authored by Song Zhang and Peisen Huang of the State University of New York at Stony Brook; "A Time-of-Flight Depth Sensor — System Description, Issues and Solutions" by S. Burak Göktürk, Hakan Yalcin, and Cyrus Bamji of Canesta; "Surface Determination by Photometric Ranging," by Jeffrey B. Mulligan and Xavier Brolly of NASA; and "Visual Tracking [of objects] Using Depth Data", by Harsh Nanda and Kikuo Fujimura, based upon work at Honda.
"We are extremely encouraged that such high caliber companies and individuals participated in the event," said Burak Göktürk, Ph.D a scientist at Canesta and one of the organizers of the workshop. "Over the next few decades, with the availability of real-time 3-D sensors, it will become clear that the interaction of everyday devices and machines with the world around them through an ability to 'see' will usher in a new era of personal convenience, safety and security."
Göktürk said that based upon the response, the expectation is that the workshop will become an annual event. The proceedings of the conference, including the workshop papers, is available from the IEEE at URL http://www.computer.org/cspress/catalog/p2158.htm. Its ISBN # is 0-7695-2158-4.
Canesta is the inventor of a revolutionary, low-cost electronic perception technology that enables machines and ordinary electronic devices to perceive and react to nearby objects or individuals in real time.
When sight-enabled with Canesta's unique electronic perception chips and software, consumer, automotive, industrial, military, and medical products can gain functionality and ease of use not possible in an era when such devices were blind.
Canesta believes future applications of electronic perception technology are virtually as broad as the imagination. They may include intelligent automobile airbag systems that can sense the size and position of an occupant to control deployment and avoid injury, a low-false-alarm security system that could detect the difference between an intruder and normal activity, such as a pet moving or child visiting the bathroom at night, or robotic tools that can successfully operate in a dynamic, rather than static environment.
Canesta was founded in April 1999, and is located in San Jose, CA. The company has filed in excess of forty patents, 12 of which have been granted so far. Investment to date exceeds $36 million, from Apax Partners, Carlyle Venture Partners, Intel Capital, JP Morgan Partners, Korea Global IT Fund (KGIF), TechFund Capital, Thales Corporate Ventures, and Venrock Associates.