Cameras with converters pick up awards

Two cameras that won accolades from judges at the 2012 New Product Showcase (NPS) awards at the International Security Conference (ISC) West in Las Vegas, NV were both developed using Pixim’s (Mountain View, CA, USA) Seawolf imaging chips.

The BC620WDR network camera from TKH Security Solutions (Germantown, MD, USA) won the Judges' Choice award, while the Interlogix (Bradenton, FL,USA) UltraView XP4 camera series won in the video surveillance cameras standard definition (SD) category.

Pixim’s so-called “Digital Pixel System” employed in the Seawolf imagers in the cameras is built upon technology developed at Stanford University in the 1990s. Key to the technology is the inclusion of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) within each pixel of the image sensor. The ADC translates the light signal into a digital value at the immediate point of capture, minimizing signal degradation and cross-talk in the array.

Once the data is converted to a digital format, a variety of digital signal processing techniques can be used for optimal image reproduction.

-- by Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design