Cheap 3D Computer Vision?

InspectorPraline writes "According to this article at the New York Times [free reg req'd], a tech firm known as Tyzx is developing optics technology that will have three-dimensional capability -- using two cameras attached by a high-bandwidth connection to a custom processing card inside a PC. The article makes one believe that the system would have a top speed of as much as 132 stereo frames per second, which could be very useful in security systems. Of course, the real question is who's behind the cameras, but we can all drool over the other possibilities, right?"

How the DeepSea chip works

[jukal]

This is taken from the document Real-time Stereo Vision for Real-world object tracking [tyzx.com]:
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The DeepSea chip is hardware implementation of the census correspondence algorithm invented by Tyzx staff... The algorithm's key concept is transforming a pixel's numeric absolute intensity value into a bit string that represents the pixel's brightness relative ot it's neighboring pixels. For each pixel, The DeepSea chip examines the pixels surrounding area called a neighborhood. A typical neighborhood is 7x7 pixels centered on the subject pixel. Comparing a subject pixel's intensity to its neighbours, the chip produces a relative intensity map (show in the document, page 8).
.... the DeepSea chip may not be able to find a valid match for every pixel in the image. Large unformity lit areas of scene may have pixels of identical intensity; for pixels in such area, no single match can be found. Pixels that correspond to an object that is invisible to one imager but the other also do not have matching pixels.
... Once the matching process is complete, the range of each pixel can be calucated using the horizontal disparity of the matching pixels, the focal lenghts of the lenses and the distance between them. The DeepSea chip designates the range or anormalous pixels as invalid.
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(typos are mine) :)) See also a HP document [hp.com] covering partly the same matter.

The "Cyberscope" was quite cheap

[bodin]

But it is no longer in production and it is patended.

Works with any software as it is attached at the front of the screen. Surface mirrors and the idea of doing the view-master 'on screen'

I'll keep mine for a long time.

A description and pictures of it here [nau.edu]

Patent here [uspto.gov] with description.