In an interview with EE Times, Jérôme Meniere, chairman and CEO of DXO Labs, shrank the field of view and focused on DXO Labs' solutions for camera phones, and unveiled future research directions.

DxO Labs, whose business model is based on developing and licensing intellectual property of optics and silicon architectures, said its embedded imaging product portfolio integrates a range of image processing and extended depth of field technologies for camera phones.

Meniere started with DxO Labs' image signal processor (ISP) solution that provides the DSC class image processing without the digital optics implementation. Then, he cited the DxO IPC, a configurable, programmable and scalable SIMD image processing core and imaging firmware addressing the challenges of embedded image processing.

"DxO IPC is a scalable solution so that we can put as many processing units as possible in line with customers' specs, whether they want to do full HD in real time or if they only want to go up to 5 megapixels. We scale silicon and we have our algorithms run on top of it so as to offer an optimized platform for our image processing algorithms."

DxO Labs also provides the calibration and tuning tools which allow the configuration of the ISP to be done more easily and at a lower cost. Meniere noted: "Calibration and tuning consist in configuring your ISP for a given sensor, a given optic. This task usually takes months at OEMs and becomes a big roadblock in the finalization of the camera phone platform. That is the consequence of ever increasing megapixels."

Another marker of differentiation is DxO Labs' Extended Depth-of-Field (EDoF) technology that has been developed to reduce the optical system cost, said Meniere.

DxO Labs has developed the EDoF technology for miniature camera phones by jointly optimizing optical system and post-capture digital processing techniques. Using the principles of longitudinal chromatic aberration, the solution allows a fixed focus lens paired with DxO Digital Optics technology to achieve performance normally only available in a lens system with an actuator. The elimination of the actuator results in cost savings, both in terms of materials and improved yields for the simpler fixed focus camera design, DxO Labs claimed.