A device that mimics the human eye with far greater speed and precision than anything ever invented is being offered to prospective buyers in what is believed to be the world's first major high technology auction.
"The GVPP (Generic Visual Perception Processor) is truly a 'disruptive technology,' in that it brings to the market a whole new set of value propositions," says Joseph Harbaugh, dean of the Law Center at Nova Southeastern University and the director of technology transfer for BEV (Bureau d'Etudes Vision), the French firm that has developed the instrument.
"Like the light bulb, the telephone, the analog computer and the Internet, the GVPP will significantly alter existing markets and create new markets," Harbaugh says. "One of the characteristics of disruptive technologies is that it is extremely difficult to predict their impact on the market. Rather than assume we know precisely what markets exist for GVPP, we have decided upon a three-stage auction process for interested buyers."
In stage one, approximately 60 companies from around the world are being sent a technology information memorandum explaining GVPP technology, how it works, and its possible uses. The auction is being organized and managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Interested firms will have an opportunity to witness technical demonstrations of GVPP at the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Technology Center in Menlo Park, CA.
After the initial technical demonstrations, firms will be invited to a "plug fest," the non- confidential phase of stage two of the auction. At this point, their engineers will be able to "play" with the technology and conduct diligence testing using working models of the newest generation of the instrument. Companies taking part in the "plug fest" will pay a fee to cover costs.
Selected firms then will be invited to enter the confidential phase of stage two of the auction. In the confidential phase, the firms will conduct corporate and technical due diligence in which they will have access to a confidential data room. They will be able to question in person BEV's chief engineer and the inventor of the GVPP, Patrick Pirim, along with BEV's chief consulting engineer, Stanford University Computer Science Professor Thomas O. Binford. Firms progressing to this stage also will have access to an "evaluation kit" consisting of a working model of GVPP, for extended testing at their own laboratories.
BEV then will select a limited number of companies to take part in the third stage of the auction based on what BEV assesses to be a firm's ability and commitment to commercialize the technology.
"In stage three, the remaining companies will submit bids," says Harbaugh, "and we will examine them and respond as appropriate."
GVPP is a vision processing "system on a chip" that can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of competing systems available today. It is the product of more than a decade of research and was invented by Patrick Pirim who believed that vision systems should be based on a "perception paradigm." In other words, he was seeking a technology that would model the visual perception capabilities of the human brain.
GVPP is a single chip able to detect objects in a motion video signal and then to locate and track them in real time. It can perform over 20 billion operations per second.
By contrast, digital signal processing and similar current vision technologies are expensive--retailing from $1,000 to $10,000 per unit--and fall prey to slight changes in conditions such as lighting which can foil their detection and tracking systems, a problem GVPP overcomes.
"The most significant technical breakthrough of GVPP is a spatio-temporal neuron which is the basic building block of a perception processor," says Harbaugh. "This allows GVPP to analyze successive frames of video in real time to determine the speed, direction, hue, luminance and saturation of each pixel. GVPP can then detect and track objects in real time that meet criteria such as size, shape, color and direction of motion."
GVPP can be manufactured for less than $7 per chip, companies officials say, making it possible to bring consumer products to market with relatively low retail prices.
What products?
"While it's impossible to predict the future, we have identified more than 100 high end and low end applications across at least 10 industries," Harbaugh says. "PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated the GVPP is capable of generating a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. We think in excess of 100 million GVPPs may be manufactured and sold between 2001 and 2005."
GVPP, for example, could detect when a driver of a car or truck is not attentive and warn the driver. And it could do so for a cost of less than $100 per unit. By contrast, current driver assistance systems do not perform well in all lighting conditions and with a cost of $10,000 or more per unit are simply too expensive to be commercially viable. From the movement of the eyelids as detected by GVPP, a microprocessor determines the duration of each blink and the intervals between blinks, parameters that easily reveal when a driver is falling asleep.
Another automotive application is warning erratic drivers. GVPP does so by monitoring the left and right lanes of the road, signaling the driver when the vehicle deviates from the proscribed lane.
Also with transportation, GVPP could be used in developing systems for collision avoidance, automatic cruise control, smart air bag systems, license plate recognition, measurement of traffic flow, electronic toll collection, automatic cargo tracking, parking management and the inspection of cracks in rails and tunnels.
In manufacturing, GVPP would have applications in robotics, particularly for dirty and dangerous jobs such as feeding hot parts to forging presses, cleaning up hazardous waste, and spraying toxic coatings on aircraft parts.
In agriculture and fisheries engineering, GVPP could help with tasks that traditionally have been labor intensive such as disease and parasite identification, harvest control, ripeness detection and yield identification.
Military applications include unmanned air vehicles, automatic target detection, trajectory correction, ground reconnaissance and surveillance. Vision systems are useful in home security, as well, and GVPP-based systems could be inexpensively developed to detect intruders and fires.
The market for vision technology is expanding in many other fields, as well, suppressed only by the expense involved and lack, until now, of reliable technology that could do the job. GVPP should be able to tap markets in fields such as medical scanners, blood analyzers, cardiac monitoring, bank checks, bar code reading, seal and signature verification, trademark database indexing, construction of virtual reality environment models, human motion analysis, expression understanding, cloud identification, and many other fields.
"Like all disruptive technologies," says Harbaugh, "GVPP will create applications we haven't yet dreamed about."
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EDITORS: Contact Joseph Harbaugh at 954-262-6101 or e-mail him at [email protected]. Good video is available on GVPP showing its application with driver safety, if you would like to see that. You can also contact Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications at 814-867-1963 or [email protected].
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