As autonomous vehicles and other surveillance cameras become increasingly common, the need for cameras to produce clearer images has never been greater. One UW-Madison professor is helping to meet this demand, with the help of NSF I-Corps™.
Andreas Velten, a UW–Madison Associate Professor, and a team at MIT created Ubicept, a company that uses single photon imaging to improve computer vision.
The team at Ubicept has developed technology to see individual photons, or the smallest possible units of light. If you are reading this article on a screen or a page, streams of photons are carrying the images of the words to your eyes. Ubicept uses Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensors to create quality images. This technology allows for fast motion imaging to have reduced blurring, and elevated image quality in lowlight conditions.
SPAD sensors detect and time individual photons to preserve information that conventional imaging systems discard or degrade. These sensors detect individual photons, then convert them into digital information. This process gives access to completely novel optical information for imaging, allowing images to show us things we’ve never been able to see before.
“Ubicept is a company that rides on a recent technological revolution that affects most imaging for our cameras. We can now build camera sensors that directly digitize photon arrivals, where in the past our cameras couldn’t do that,” Velten said.
I-Corps guided the process of Ubicept’s startup. Velten’s postdoctoral fellow, Sebastian Bauer, started with the broad idea, and I-Corps allowed their team to develop their technology into a company. It was an important transition component that also helped the team learn.
“One of the most useful things about I-Corps is the entrepreneurial education of people, because they’re usually scientists that have no prior training. Then you get the ability to do interviews and get market ideas,” Velten said.
After using the funding and support from I-Corps to finalize the ideas behind Ubicept, Velten and his team began licensing their technology to industry partners. One of their most notable partnerships is with Canon. Ubicept develops the processing layer that sits between a camera’s sensor and its downstream applications. Working with a leading sensor manufacturer like Canon gives the company access to some of the most advanced hardware on the market to build on. To date, the company has received over $12m in funding from supporters throughout the country to hone their technology.
Ubicept focuses on more than just industrial partnership. As a collaboration between UW–Madison and MIT, Velten credits academic collaboration as critical to the company’s success. That academic connection extends beyond the founding team—several of Velten’s students have gone on to work at Ubicept full-time after starting as interns.
“What’s quite exciting is that a lot of my students actually ended up doing internships and are working there now,” Velten said.
For the faculty, grads, and postdocs who are considering a similar entrepreneurial path with an exciting technology, Velten said that a strong team is the most important first step.
“The technology can always change,” said Velten. “If somebody has an advanced technological skillset relevant to an industry, if they learn about customer needs, they can usually find an angle to solve them that nobody else could come up with. You just need an excuse to start working and start talking to people.”
•••
Andreas Velten is dually appointed in the Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UW–Madison.
Written by Bianca Cherry