Fearless glare, understand the world - Obi Zhongguang new product D-Light sword refers to the outdoor brush face blind spot

Chaodian Think Tank, Obi Zhongguang Industry's first outdoor glare depth camera D-Light released video number

Obi Zhongguang, which has been leading in the field of domestic 3D visual perception, has once again brought a surprise breakthrough to the brush face payment industry.

On April 22, Obi Zhongguang released the industry's first outdoor glare depth camera D-Light, playing the proposition of "fearless glare, understanding the world". D-Light is equipped with Aobi Zhongguang's new 3D structured light brush face payment module, which breaks through the technical limitations of face recognition under strong light and is difficult to complete and clear imaging, and solves the pain points of the outdoor brush face payment industry.

"Fearless of 10W Lux (illuminance) outdoor glare is the main feature of D-Light." Dr. David Chen, Vice President and Head of Product Management Department of Obi Zhongguang, introduced that D-Light can be widely landed in outdoor places such as scenic spots, campuses, gas stations, high-speed rail/subway/buses. This also makes Obi Zhongguang the only company on the market to solve the problem of 10W Lux outdoor strong light depth imaging.

Tianxiang, general manager of the strategic business product line of Obi Zhongguang, told reporters that as an overall technology supplier of 3D visual perception solutions, Obi Zhongguang currently ranks first in Asia in the shipping scale of 3D visual perception, and provides 3D face brush payment modules for the vast majority of Alipay's face brush payment terminals.

The release of D-Light means that Obi Zhongguang's 3D structured light technology has realized the full scene coverage of brush face payment: from indoor to outdoor, from brush face to core body.

In addition to structured light, Obi Zhongguang also lays out a full range of 3D visual perception technologies. As machine vision gradually jumps from 2D to 3D, the industry will usher in a new intelligent upgrade. In this process, the positioning of Obi Zhongguang is to focus on the underlying technology of 3D visual perception, and continue to provide customers with advanced intelligent visual solutions, becoming the "enabler" in this visual revolution.

01 The underlying chip broke the game and broke through the 10W Lux glare brush face limit

The "D" in D-Light means daylight "Daylight", and the reason for the name is straightforward: Obi Zhongguang hopes that the structured light products of the D series can provide a complete and reliable image in daylight.

The birth of the demand for D series products stems from the actual pain points in the promotion of brush face payment. Since the commercial use of face brush payment began in 2017, this convenient payment method has accelerated the scale of offline supermarkets. However, the problem that the outdoor brush face payment experience is not as friendly as indoor has not been effectively solved.

According to Qi Hanyu, senior 3D structured light algorithm engineer of Obi Zhongguang, face brush payment mainly uses structured light technology with financial-grade security. The basic principle of structured light is to project a laser of 940 nm through a laser emitter, and then obtain a speckle texture through the receiving end for three-dimensional reconstruction. When the light in the 940nm band in natural light is relatively strong, the texture characteristics acquired by the structured light camera will be destroyed, and effective depth imaging cannot be carried out, directly affecting face recognition.

This technical problem has always restricted the landing of brush face payment in more diversified outdoor scenes. In this regard, the solution of Obi Zhongguang is to break the situation from the bottom through the systematic linkage of chips, optics and algorithms.

D-Light is equipped with the MX6600 new structured optical ASIC chip developed by Aubi China Optical, which has an overall chip performance of 150% higher than that of the previous generation, enabling the camera to output depth images with 1.3M@50FPS resolution and independent ISP processing capabilities.

Illustration: D-Light can output speckle, depth, and point cloud maps with high accuracy and completeness.

"Chips are like brains, which are the bridge between software and hardware of products. The software solution is designed into the chip to realize the combination of software and hardware, and provide a computing platform for the hardware. Qi Hanyu introduced that the inclusion of some ISP functions into the chip is the key to making the depth map more complete and the performance more superior.

Facts also show that D-Light is not only much better than the previous generation of products in terms of performance, but also its application performance is far better than similar products on the market today. At present, it is difficult for products on the market to achieve 10W lux brush face recognition payment under strong light.

Dr. David Chen introduced that in the outdoor 10W Lux strong light, D-Light can provide a complete depth map and point cloud map in the recognition range of 30cm-140cm, with an accuracy of 0.300% @100cm, 0.400% @140cm, and a depth image at a distance of 100cm is more accurate, with a face integrity of up to 99%.

This is a breakthrough in the field of 3D vision, and it is also a breakthrough in the brush face payment industry.

02 Systematic linkage, challenging the difficult to complete "three-way flow output"

Brushing your face in 10W lux glare is a core feature of D-Light, and its two other product highlights include high-efficiency HDR and smart AE.

HDR, or high dynamic range, processes the colors in multi-frame images through chips and algorithms, and finally makes the colors of the images appear fuller. When users use the mobile phone to take pictures, the normal color contrast is average, but after turning on HDR mode, the color contrast will be improved immediately, making the image color clearer.

The average data measured by D-Light at 100cm distance HDR is 96dB, up to 115dB. This feature enables D-Light to meet different complex scenarios such as backlighting and backlighting.

AE is auto exposure. Similar to the principle of automatic exposure in ordinary cameras, the dark image is automatically brightened, and the bright image is automatically dimmed, so that the image is close to the light range that the human eye can accept. On the depth camera, smart AE can reduce the light stress into a range that is more suitable for the sensor to perceive, so that the sensor can process it into a better depth map.

However, in the process of product development, it is not difficult to break through a single function, but to make each function "run at full speed", it poses a big challenge to the team.

For example, initially, while maintaining a high frame rate, the AE algorithm needed to handle complex alternating streams, resulting in a much poorer depth quality of the final output, which made the development "stutter" for a while.

Obi Zhongguang did not rely on pure software solutions to "cure the symptoms", but tried a more "root cause" approach. The team combined the optical group and the algorithm group, and then submitted the solution to the chipset, through the technical linkage, digging deep into the chip circuit level for optimization, and finally realized the dynamic intelligent AE solution.

Illustration: D-Light disassembly diagram.

In Qi Hanyu's view, Obi Zhongguang has always emphasized systematic ability. "If you only rely on a single point of ability, such as using some deep learning or filtering algorithms, you can also solve the problem of strong light on this scene to a certain extent, but it will bring greater platform-side resource consumption, resulting in the solution is difficult to land."

Kung Fu pays off. In the bright light environment, D-Light can realize three different types of high-quality image three-way alternating output (Depth: 960*1280@25fps; NIR: 960*1280@25fps; Color: 960*1280@60fps), greatly enhancing the accuracy of multimodal face recognition. D-Light can also expose the face of the color map and the NIR map at the same time, and then process the image through the ISP, making the AE smoother and the brightness better, thereby improving the algorithm recognition speed and user experience.

03 Build 22 real-world scenarios to test repeatedly, challenging extreme performance

From the thorny road to the cloud and the moon, the hardships experienced by the R&D team of Obi Zhongguang are self-evident.

Unlike indoor products, outdoor products need to have a larger operating temperature range in order to be used normally in extreme high and low temperature weather. The operating temperature range of D-Light products is between -25°C and 75°C, and during the development process, Obi Zhongguang also invested a lot of time in temperature testing, repeatedly challenging the extreme operating temperature of the equipment.

In the low temperature environment, D-Light mainly relies on the voltage stabilization design of the electronic circuit to "keep warm"; in the high temperature environment, it is through the excellent external structure to ensure the heat dissipation effect, such as metal shell, heat sink and so on.

An efficient temperature management mechanism is the magic weapon to overcome the limit temperature. The big premise of all this is that the optical system is designed well enough to work in extreme temperature environments.

In order to ensure the adaptability of the product in different color environments, the D-Light team built 22 actual scenes for experiments - both conventional scenes and simulation experiments of complex scenes, and truly detected the performance of the product through various interference environments, and constantly corrected its compatibility until the final problem was solved.

With a technological breakthrough and test optimization, what else is needed?

At this online conference, Obi Zhongguang also highlighted a key word - mass production.

Photo note: Dr. David Chen, Vice President and Head of Product Management Department of Obi Zhongguang, introduced the new D-Light products

"It's not a difficult thing to achieve a certain technical indicator in the laboratory. But if we want to engineer this indicator, manufacture it on a large scale, and ensure the consistency and reliability of the product, we need to step out step by step, there is no shortcut. Dr. David Chen said.

04 Continue to empower the era of brush face payment in all scenarios

D-Light is Obi's first outdoor glare brush face payment product, which is of landmark significance: at this point, Obi Zhongguang's 3D structured light technology has been able to cover the entire scene of face brush payment.

Market data shows that China's face brush payment users will be close to 500 million in 2021 and will increase to 760 million in 2022.

"Although affected by the epidemic, the face brush payment technology and the industry itself are still in the stage of development and rise." According to Tianxiang, the technology of brush face payment has been continuously iteratively upgraded, and the technology of brushing face payment with a mask has been relatively mature, and there are also quite strict certification standards in security. Previously, Obi Zhongguang's face detection technology and face recognition technology obtained double certification from BCTC (National Financial Technology Evaluation Center) and met Alipay's technical test specifications at the same time.

Picture note: Tianxiang, general manager of the strategic business product line of Obi Zhongguang, introduced the development of the brush face payment industry at the press conference.

At present, the shipment scale of Obi Zhongguang indoor brush face payment equipment has exceeded one million levels, and the outdoor brush face payment scene market is in the pipeline, and it is expected to reach 100,000 shipments in the early stage.

In order to meet the production capacity and efficient delivery, in July 2020, Aobi Zhongguang built a 16,000-square-meter high-end manufacturing plant, using world-class packaging equipment, and its self-developed 3D module test equipment is at the leading level in China.

Since providing hardware support for Alipay in 2017 and helping Alipay take the lead in realizing large-scale commercialization of offline 3D face brush payment in 2018, Obi Zhongguang has continued to break through technical bottlenecks, providing 3D face brush payment modules for most of Alipay's face brush payment terminals, and promoting the application innovation of 3D visual perception technology in the financial field by jointly building the "3D Visual Joint Laboratory" with China UnionPay.

There is reason to believe that the industry leader Aobi Zhongguang will "fearlessly" more challenging technical problems and market pain points, continue to innovate safer, more convenient and more comprehensive technological breakthroughs and application results, lead the industry frontier, and open up a broader market space for the whole scene of face brush payment.