Metalenz, the Boston company behind the Polar ID face authentication system, has acquired PxE Imaging, an Israeli startup whose technology lets a standard image sensor capture color and depth at the same time. Terms were not disclosed.
PxE’s Holocoder technology, invented by co-founder and CEO Yoav Berlatzky, is patterned directly onto the sensor, as Metalenz’s Polar ID is. It uses the wave nature of light to decode wavelength and depth in hardware, producing a color image and a depth map from a single camera without a separate depth module or sensor fusion software.
The technology also replaces the Bayer filter that most cameras use to produce color images. Metalenz said the filter absorbs about 60 percent of incoming light, and that the Holocoder sorts light without absorbing it, delivering 2.5 times more light to the sensor and improving performance in both dark and bright scenes.
Metalenz was spun out of Harvard University in 2016 and says it has shipped more than 300 million metasurface optics in consumer devices. Its PolarEyes platform captures polarization information that lets machine vision systems tell materials apart, and its first product, Polar ID, uses that information for what the company calls payment-grade face authentication at a fraction of the size and cost of existing systems. Polar ID entered mass production at UMC last year.
With PxE, Metalenz adds color and depth data to the material and surface information it already captures, aimed at consumer electronics, automotive, drones and robotics. Because the information is decoded in hardware, the company said, less computation is needed downstream and AI models can run more efficiently on the device. In February Metalenz introduced Polar 3D, which extended its face authentication hardware to avatar generation and relighting from a single image.
“With PxE’s technology and team, we’re expanding our capabilities into visible sensing, addressing a longstanding problem of low light performance while solving the new physical AI problem of obtaining richer information beyond conventional RGB imagery,” said Rob Devlin, Metalenz’s co-founder and CEO.
Berlatzky said joining Metalenz “gives us the manufacturing platform and commercial reach to bring this technology to everyday devices.”
Sources: GlobeNewswire
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
