Well Luminar was a bit left field.
I have had Luminar on my competitors list because we did not have any dots, but
@Stable Genius caused me to revisit their patents.
Luminar have a large number of LiDaR related patents, just shy of 100.
This one caught my eye and initiated a little synaptic frisson.
US2018284234A1 Foveated Imaging in a Lidar System
View attachment 30429
T
o identify the most important areas in front of a vehicle for avoiding collisions, a lidar system obtains a foveated imaging model. The foveated imaging model is generated by detecting the direction at which drivers' are facing at various points in time for several scenarios based on road conditions or upcoming maneuvers. The lidar system identifies an upcoming maneuver for the vehicle or a road condition and applies the identified maneuver or road condition to the foveated imaging model to identify a region of a field of regard at which to increase the resolution. The lidar system then increases the resolution at the identified region by increasing the pulse rate for transmitting light pulses within the identified region, filtering pixels outside of the identified region, or in any other suitable manner.
"Goodness me!*" I hear you exclaim "What is foveated imaging?"
en.wikipedia.org
F
oveated imaging is a digital image processing technique in which the image resolution, or amount of detail, varies across the image according to one or more "fixation points". A fixation point indicates the highest resolution region of the image and corresponds to the center of the eye's retina, the fovea.
In LiDaR, foveated means concentrating more light spots on a region of interest.
So why is this interesting?
In the fireside chat, PvdM mentioned that the eye has a central region which is more high definition and attuned to movement than the peripheral region which is lower definition but more sensitive to light variation (the very same fovea that Luminar's patent seeks to imitate)
So does this mean Luminar and BrainChip are an item? Well, no, but ...
* Archaic version of "WTF".
Product recall: - It has been pointed out to me by a poster that the reference to PvdM discussing high definition and lower definition peripheral regions does not exist in the fireside chat. I cannot recall the origin of the information, so the paragraph verballing Peter should be ignored, as my memory is unreliable.
All the best
DodgyNews