November 9, 2016 at 14:52Itseez, twice Intel Company
Intel, like other corporations, constantly buys and sells businesses - this is not unusual. However, the purchase of a Russian company is an extraordinary event for her. Yes, and the purchase itself is extraordinary. This post is about Intel's latest acquisition - Itseez, best known for its key role in the development of the OpenCV library.
Obviously, vision is required not only by a person, it is one of the main elements of autonomy and intelligence - that is, so that the device can independently navigate in the current environment and make decisions, it must not just watch, but see. Overseeing the distance between the meanings of these two words for more than 10 years was Itseez, whose name in English sounds literally “It sees”.
So this year, Itseez has become part of Intel again . Why again?
Itseez (originally the Argus Computer Vision Center) was founded by three former employees of the Nizhny Novgorod Intel Development Center: Victor Erukhimov, Sergey Molinov and Alexander Bovyrin. Acquainted in the process of working together on the computer vision library OpenCV at Intel, in 2005 they decided to establish their own startup. In 2013, Itseez in the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) was joined by Alexey Myakov, who in 2015 became the CEO and co-founder of the company, and in 2016 played a key role in the Itseez sale transaction.
Over 10 years, the company has grown rapidly, mainly due to youth, at the beginning of 2016 more than 100 people worked in it. Based in Nizhny Novgorod, a major academic and IT center in Russia, Itseez actively worked with students and young professionals, conducting various training events for them, such as the School for optimizing the performance of computer vision algorithms, and participating in the Google Program Summer of Code. " And, of course, the founders of Itseez were not the only former Intel employees in the company. For years, for work for various reasons, Itseez has moved a dozen qualified employees of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of Intel.
Continuing to be the main developer of the OpenCV open machine vision library, Itseez has found application for it in a wide variety of fields. The professional interests of the company team include:
In addition, from the very beginning of the inception of OpenVX - a standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision functionality, designed primarily for embedded systems and real-time systems - and until October 2016, Viktor Erukhimov was the chairman of the OpenVX working group in Khronos. By the way, more recently, an extension for working with neural networks has been added to the standard .
Itseez team in 2015.
But this is a social activity. And Itseez earned money by working under contracts with many leaders of the IT industry, such as ... Intel. It is a pity that the information on these projects is not public, and we cannot say what famous products of world corporations are made in Russia.
But we will tell you briefly about the main products and technologies that Itseez enriched with Intel (according to Itseez, which is now gone, but the Internet remembers everything).
Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) is an intelligent driver assistant. At the moment, features such as recognition of pedestrians, warning of a collision with a vehicle ahead, recognition of important road signs, detection of dividing lanes and the fact of their intersection, including in poor visibility conditions, are implemented.
Facense- a system of high-precision analysis and face transformation. It allows you to find faces in the frame, determine up to 76 characteristics of each face, and also determine gender, age, and emotional state. Among the analogues stands out extremely high speed, the ability to work in various lighting conditions, taking into account factors such as emotions, glasses, vegetation.
itSeez3D- Software for mobile 3D-scanning of people and objects. There are options for iPad (Occipital Structured Sensor) and PC (Intel Real Sense). Once I tried the work of the second option - read about it in the post about testing the RealSense camera. By the way, some time before the deal with Intel, the itSeez3D development team led by Viktor Yerukhimov separated into a separate company and remained autonomous - maybe there are people who want to buy it?
By acquiring Itseez, Intel has once again demonstrated how much attention the company is devoting to creating smart devices - elements of the “Internet of things”. But Intel, in turn, has its own assets in this area - for example, RealSense technology. Obviously, this is the case when together more fun.
Well, on our blog, we note the deal by joining posts from the former Itseez company blog to it. Here is a list of the most interesting in our opinion.
We recommend re-reading them to everyone interested in the topic of computer vision - the guys know what they wrote about, not without reason even Wikipedia refers to them.
Obviously, vision is required not only by a person, it is one of the main elements of autonomy and intelligence - that is, so that the device can independently navigate in the current environment and make decisions, it must not just watch, but see. Overseeing the distance between the meanings of these two words for more than 10 years was Itseez, whose name in English sounds literally “It sees”.
So this year, Itseez has become part of Intel again . Why again?
Itseez (originally the Argus Computer Vision Center) was founded by three former employees of the Nizhny Novgorod Intel Development Center: Victor Erukhimov, Sergey Molinov and Alexander Bovyrin. Acquainted in the process of working together on the computer vision library OpenCV at Intel, in 2005 they decided to establish their own startup. In 2013, Itseez in the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) was joined by Alexey Myakov, who in 2015 became the CEO and co-founder of the company, and in 2016 played a key role in the Itseez sale transaction.
Over 10 years, the company has grown rapidly, mainly due to youth, at the beginning of 2016 more than 100 people worked in it. Based in Nizhny Novgorod, a major academic and IT center in Russia, Itseez actively worked with students and young professionals, conducting various training events for them, such as the School for optimizing the performance of computer vision algorithms, and participating in the Google Program Summer of Code. " And, of course, the founders of Itseez were not the only former Intel employees in the company. For years, for work for various reasons, Itseez has moved a dozen qualified employees of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of Intel.
Continuing to be the main developer of the OpenCV open machine vision library, Itseez has found application for it in a wide variety of fields. The professional interests of the company team include:
- computer vision based car safety systems,
- intelligent video surveillance systems,
- 3D (stereo, reconstruction),
- scene recognition, object detection / classification,
- deep / machine learning
- convolutional neuron networks,
- virtual / augmented reality,
In addition, from the very beginning of the inception of OpenVX - a standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision functionality, designed primarily for embedded systems and real-time systems - and until October 2016, Viktor Erukhimov was the chairman of the OpenVX working group in Khronos. By the way, more recently, an extension for working with neural networks has been added to the standard .
Itseez team in 2015.
But this is a social activity. And Itseez earned money by working under contracts with many leaders of the IT industry, such as ... Intel. It is a pity that the information on these projects is not public, and we cannot say what famous products of world corporations are made in Russia.
But we will tell you briefly about the main products and technologies that Itseez enriched with Intel (according to Itseez, which is now gone, but the Internet remembers everything).
Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) is an intelligent driver assistant. At the moment, features such as recognition of pedestrians, warning of a collision with a vehicle ahead, recognition of important road signs, detection of dividing lanes and the fact of their intersection, including in poor visibility conditions, are implemented.
Facense- a system of high-precision analysis and face transformation. It allows you to find faces in the frame, determine up to 76 characteristics of each face, and also determine gender, age, and emotional state. Among the analogues stands out extremely high speed, the ability to work in various lighting conditions, taking into account factors such as emotions, glasses, vegetation.
itSeez3D- Software for mobile 3D-scanning of people and objects. There are options for iPad (Occipital Structured Sensor) and PC (Intel Real Sense). Once I tried the work of the second option - read about it in the post about testing the RealSense camera. By the way, some time before the deal with Intel, the itSeez3D development team led by Viktor Yerukhimov separated into a separate company and remained autonomous - maybe there are people who want to buy it?
By acquiring Itseez, Intel has once again demonstrated how much attention the company is devoting to creating smart devices - elements of the “Internet of things”. But Intel, in turn, has its own assets in this area - for example, RealSense technology. Obviously, this is the case when together more fun.
Well, on our blog, we note the deal by joining posts from the former Itseez company blog to it. Here is a list of the most interesting in our opinion.
- A Brief History of the OpenCV Project
- OpenVX: Computer Vision Standard
- How we ported OpenCV to WindowsRT
- Segmentation Algorithm Overview
We recommend re-reading them to everyone interested in the topic of computer vision - the guys know what they wrote about, not without reason even Wikipedia refers to them.
