Gatineau company building technology for advanced rear-view cameras in cars
The Ottawa Citizen ran a profile today on CogniVue, a Gatineau company that’s exploring all kinds of uses for camera technology.
CogniVue was founded in 2005 as a subsidiary of MtekVision Co. Ltd., a South Korean electronics company. The Korean parent company originally had CogiVue as a branch plant, in essence, design low-power multimedia processing chips, but since spinning the the company off from the MtekVision to give it more autonomy, CogniVue has been finding lucrative applications for camera technology.
"The Korean parent company wanted to create more out of the operation here in Canada by giving it some independence to build its own business, build its own product line and basically attack markets they weren't addressing in Korea," said CEO Simon Morris. "In this case, we are going after markets that need image cognition or pattern cognition-type processing, which is image detection and recognition."
And markets that need that type of application include automotive driver assistance, a new segment that CogniVue is going after, said Morris.
"People in Ottawa could be driving a car in the near future that has a chip in it that's doing image processing for things such as backup camera, blind spot detection, driver monitoring, collision avoidance and lane departure warning," Morris said.
CogniVue software and intellectual property products capture, ana-lyse, and render high-quality video and images for smart cameras. The company is known in the industry for the development of the Maple multimedia processor product line for MtekVision, which generated about $150 million in sales for the Korean company, said Morris.
It seems like Canada’s automotive heartland and its high-tech heartland are sharing more than just geography. The automotive industry is demanding further technological advances, and Canada has plenty of companies up for the challenge.
