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ISB, you never know, this could all be part of a stage managed marketing campaign, releasing news of our new capabilities in stages in small enough words for finance types to understand once someone explains it. But our customers are already aware, they asked for it and have probably been working with it for months. Now we need the market to catch up. They will when we start to announce who is using it, and how quickly it reached the market (maybe we can get some cars on the road in 18-24 months that would be fast!)

ISB,
Thanks for taking the time to go back, we all miss things, it is only later that the truth becomes clear. I always spot something new when I go back and read RNSs in the light of later news and research

I will tell you a "secret", the OMS is already developed, it is baked into Fovio and Occula . That is how Harman can put out patents for Infotainment systems with off-axis driver monitoring, why Qualcomm is developing Infotainment with cameras in the header unit and what Gentex will be putting behind their mirror. But don't tell anyone. Go back and read my post yesterday (or day before as it is now late!) that explains about the pixels and lenses

So, a competitor has announced an extension to an existing customer on the same hardware platform with a few software tweaks. Hardly rocket science - reselling the same old rope to an existing customer, who is accustomed to the smell of old rope.
Was this competitive, did anyone else get involved in RFI, RFQ or negotiations? I think not.
Where will we be tomorrow? Well, first we need to review some recent history.
4 June 2018
a *program design win*, working with a major Tier 1 partner, with a global US-headquartered automotive OEM… FOVIO driver monitoring technology into *multiple vehicle platforms for mass production from 2020*
The estimated revenue value of this program is *over A$50M* based on initial included models and lifetime volume projections. The first material production revenue is expected to be recognised in Seeing Machines' 2021 financial year. There also remains potential for further program growth based on additional vehicle models added during the program.
That was the Ford’s F-150, and the Mustang Mach-E and … well we will wait and see, the true value? Stick a zero on the end!
This is the First pillar: FOVIO Chip which runs on Xylix and now with 50% reduction in load.
Just over 2 years and production is almost started.
--
Now the other 2 pillars, I must admit I get confused. Pilar 2 is the embedded Driver Monitoring Engine (e-DME). It is software that is optimised to be efficient on all of the main Automotive platforms, so if you run your car software on A, B, C, D, … you can license the software and run it alongside your existing code in infotainment units ADAS, etc I expect that this will be the route that will convert many new customers to join See. I expect that Qualcomm is the reason why many of the current RNSs disappeared, they will reappear with Qualcomm, Garmin, Harman, LQE as well as the regular Tier 1s, but they will all have See on board

Pillar 3 is to include the Occula code inside of custom chips called ASICs, these are optimised to be extremely efficient and allows a Tier 1 to design a chip to support a family of cars as the volumes rises, the costs get spread further, I expect this is the route that BMW will go with a single chip designed for a family of cars such as 3, 4, X3, X4, Z4, …
Renesas could be the first semi-conductor company that we have the MOU with; I expect we will get some more too, but it is only a short list to choose from! I can’t believe we would go to this level of time and expense if we were not fulfilling pent up demand
--
So don’t worry if our competitors pick up a few scraps, we don’t want a monopoly, we want to share the customers between them and each of our 3 pillars

PM,

https://ams.com/tmf8801

It is AMS not ARM, a Time of flight sensor is like a mini radar - it sends out a pulse of light and times it coming back. That is what they use to turn off the screen as you hold your phone to your ear or put it in your pocket, or so they know that you are about to pick it up so the screen goes off

Director Technical Marketing
Seeing MachinesUnited States
Seeing Machines
Director Technical Marketing
Seeing MachinesUnited States

Seeing Machines
Director Technical Marketing
Seeing MachinesUnited States
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Direct message the job poster from Seeing Machines

Glen Brennan
Glen Brennan
Director, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources
Seeing Machines works with the world's leading automotive OEMs and Tier One suppliers to deliver state-of-the-art driver monitoring technology enabling safer Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving (AD) solutions. Demand for camera-based Driver Monitoring System (DMS) technology across the Automotive and other transport related industries continues to be reinforced through regulation and technology advancements globally to enhance safety and convenience for drivers. Seeing Machines, industry leading pioneer of DMS, is well placed to leverage these market dynamics.

We are searching for an experienced Technical Marketing Director, based in North America, to lead the technical marketing strategy for our business, with a focus on our global automotive product line.

The Opportunity

The integration of effective driver monitoring systems poses one of the most technically challenging problems for automakers. As Director – Technical Marketing, you understand our customers, the problems they face and how Seeing Machines can provide those solutions.

You will lead technical marketing and communications, responsible for:

Positioning product and teaching our customers about driver monitoring technology and how it can be valuable to them - introducing them to new concepts which can help them achieve their goals
Communicating our value and showcasing the capabilities of Seeing Machines for the use cases which our customers care about – building credibility, conveying a memorable message and offering beneficial insight to understand true market requirements and help our product lines bridge the gaps in product definition, planning and feature development
Producing high quality technical marketing collateral and content such as sell sheets, technical articles, conference and technical presentations, webinars, technology demonstrations, videos, blogs, workshops etc. – connecting our value to customer needs

A close partner to the Sales & Marketing/Business Development team, you will be required to establish a common understanding of complex technical topics between globally based customers and engineering leads in Australia - through expert feedback of requirements gathering which will feed into the company’s technical strategy.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2179957741

Sorry Hyms, not me, I am strictly an amateur

Esc that means a lot, I really respected James Burke and looked forward to seeing him on TV when I was young

Hyms,
it is down to cost, power, processing weight and pixels.

A camera sensor has only so many pixels, the more you have the better the resolution, but more power and processing are required which generates heat.

The lens controls the areas in the view that the camera maps to the pixels with a narrow field of view each pixel covers a small area and each pixel covers roughly the same sized area.

With a wide angle lens, rather than 20, 30, 40 degrees of view, you may be covering 100-140 degrees, but the underlying sensor is the same, so the area that each pixel represents is bigger. In the centre of the view this may be roughly square, but towards the edges it becomes elongated to a rectangle, or even a kite shape in the corners. With the loss in resolution on the target area there will be some reduction in how many pixels represent an eye, but you can gain some quality because the larger area means that there are more photons from the area being captured by the lens so the sensitivity of the camera is better with less noise.

If you go to the extreme of a fisheye lens, you may have 160-170 degrees in all directions which will need a square or circular sensor, dead ahead of the lens you get a square for the pixel, but the edges are stretched and squeezed so the edges are unrecognisable.

So that is one camera, you can see that covering area and getting a good image for all of the car is going to be tricky. I can see that initially we will have the single DMS camera for the driver, in a few years we will have the single DMS or wide angled OMS camera in the low - middle range cars. High end cars may have two or more OMS cameras to cover the body of the car (certainly in 3 row SUVs) with potentially a separate DMS camera for the driver.

There is also the potential of combined OMS camera with radar as a complimentary source, either next to each other, or from different positions, so that they can better "see" behind the seats. This does of course require sensor fusion, which is another processing load that would need power and will generate heat.

This is a patent that JC posted on Friday. It describes Bosch's potential system to have multiple Drowsiness detectors which it then combines, to increase their accuracy and reliability.

Bosch has had a steering based system for some time that measures your steering and pedal inputs to spot drowsiness. Now obviously we have camera based DMS, which are themselves pretty reliable, but if the driver was to cover the camera (intentionally - black tape or accidentally - a sneeze) there would not be a signal to work from.

However, there is always a risk that the OEM didn't want to play for a good DMS and specified only an OMS to cover the legal requirement in the US of detecting babies left in the car. Then this Bosch solution would still be able to pick up the driver slumping as a Drowsiness indicator.

However, yesterday's announcement that Seeing Machines can do an Occupant Monitoring System with a wide angle camera that still has all of our DMS functionality that used to require a dedicated driver camera, so once again we have listened to the market and delivered wharf it needed before the competition.

Here is part of the patent

METHOD AND CONTROL UNIT FOR DETECTING DROWSINESS OF A DRIVER FOR A DRIVER ASSISTANCE SYSTEM FOR A VEHICLE

In the read-in step, at least a first indicator signal that represents a first drowsiness parameter of the driver determined by a first drowsiness-detection device of the vehicle, a second indicator signal that represents a second drowsiness parameter of the driver determined by a second drowsiness-detection device of the vehicle, and optionally a third indicator signal that represents a third drowsiness parameter of the driver determined by a third drowsiness-detection device of the vehicle are read in

JC, good to see that Fed Ex, a renowned "systems" company is looking to integrate a DMS in with its wider systems. Of course being a patent, it tries to include every possible combination of possible diagnostic system, but we know that more credence will be paid to a proven eye monitoring system than a leg movement detector.

Hi Abjo,
Welcome to our board. Congratulations on your recent All Time High. Hopefully we will break ours soon.

As you probably know JC and I love to read patents and research papers, have you any recent links that you could point us too?

Did you notice anything strange in the photo where Anna takes the test car for a drive. Above the rear view mirror? Could be naked cameras, but I can't see the LEDs as it is a still rather than video

Phil,

BMW only trust SEYE DMS at the speed of ZERO mph!
Here is what Victor said:

EURO NCAP tests have begun
As announced by Euro NCAP last week, Euro NCAP and Thatcham Research have just begun
testing assisted driving technologies. No car with an *activated DMS* has been tested so far,
meaning there are no real conclusions to make yet, other than that the market in general is
moving forward. BMW 3 series (with Smart Eye DMS) placed second in driver engagement
score, two points below the Mercedes GLE that shockingly enough *did not have a DMS. The
BMW 3 series DMS was turned on, but Euro NCAP says in Europe it is only used for ACC auto
resume (checking if the driver is looking at the road ahead before starting to move again)*. If
the DMS would have been used to monitor the driver during his or her driving, however Euro
NCAP says the car model would have awarded points for this. We believe the use of such a
function would have placed BMW as number one, well above Mercedes.

good spot SN, here are some options:
- it could be extra fill-in lighting for the facial detection - same 2 stereo cameras as the DMS, but they would want alternative angles filled in
- it could be a white light LED, but operating at lower intensity (they change the on-off ratio for brightness control)
- it could be for a cabin camera

Yes, good news and clears up one concern that I had was that some OEMs might try to use an OMS and coffee cup torque solution for DMS.

I was wondering if SEE were going to take on this space or be happy to coexist with partners in that space.

No partner is the wrong word, they weren't our partners, they were selected by the OEMs and we could work with them if necessary, but since they were using a different camera, it wasn't our problem. It certainly shows that it is easier to extend from DMS to OMS, whereas I had no concerns of an OMS supplier ever getting close to our DMS - it is just too specialised.

Thanks JC, this Magna patent application does seem to use many of the same features as ours: LEDs only illuminating the image part of the time with a higher rate camera with image selection to choose the best image does sound rather close to one of our patents. Let's see who wins that one

Wilson,

I think he is saying that if every car manufacturer let Google or Apple own the Infotainment space, then the OEM would be surrendering. Google and Apple will carry on with slurping your data - when you drive, where the Google Maps is navigating to, what music do you listen too, what questions to you ask Google. All of this data can be combined with the existing data that Google has on you.

VW are saying that if they do the Sat Nav and proved applications, they can isolate you from 3rd parties getting hold of the data because VW will own the gateway. If they allow Android Auto, it can be sandboxed, so they can keep the other apps separated from Google

Thanks Smokey, interesting link

The International Journal of Robotics Research
Luke Fletcher, Alexander Zelinsky

Abstract
Current road safety initiatives are approaching the limit of their effectiveness in developed countries. A paradigm shift is needed to address the preventable deaths of thousands on our roads. Previous systems have focused on one or two aspects of driving: environmental sensing, vehicle dynamics or driver monitoring. Our approach is to consider the driver and the vehicle as part of a combined system, operating within the road environment. A driver assistance system is implemented that is not only responsive to the road environment and the driver's actions but also designed to correlate the driver's eye gaze with road events to determine the driver's observations. Driver observation monitoring enables an immediate in-vehicle system able to detect and act on driver inattentiveness, providing the precious seconds for an inattentive human driver to react. We present a prototype system capable of estimating the driver's observations and detecting driver inattentiveness. Due to the “look but not see” case it is not possible to prove that a road event has been observed by the driver. We show, however, that it is possible to detect missed road events and warn the driver appropriately.

Now that is not a new article, but it is cutting edge research and beyond anything that we have seen implemented by our competitors. Who is it by, well Seeing Machines of course. So when do you think they did this research? Last year, 2 years ago, 4 years ago? Click on the link to see - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0278364908099459

JC, nothing specific to us, just shows another way to package more "chip" in a smaller space