Visionary.ai

Visionary.ai is an Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) start-up developing computer vision solutions, including night vision, removing blur and noise, and improving HDR (high dynamic range) performance and recognition. The company's AI image signal processor (ISP) and video denoiser technology aim to enhance the video output of a camera in real time, regardless of challenging imaging circumstances (e.g., low light, fog, etc.). Visionary.ai is partnered with Qualcomm, Synopsys, Ceva, Nvidia, and Cadence.

Visionary.ai's solutions aim to provide real-time video enhancement, including the following:

• Night vision
• Reduced noise
• Improved detection accuracy
• Reducing Bokeh blur effects
• Depth mapping
• Gaze correction

The company's technology has applications across a range of industries, including video conferencing, smartphone photography, security, drone vision, medicine, automobiles, consumer electronics, and machine vision for smart cities.

Visionary.ai offers a software ISP that can be used for specific imaging use cases, including consumer electronics, security and defense, medical imaging, drones, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, transportation, and IoT. Visionary.ai's ISP can run on a range of processors. Visionary.ai states its software ISP shortens the time it takes to tune an ISP for a specific task compared to a hardware ISP. These tasks can include those below:

• Black level compensation
• Enhanced demosaicing
• Color correction matrix (CCM)
• Gamma correction
• Automatic white balance (AWB)
• Temporal and spatial denoising
• Color processing (contrast, saturation, brightness, hue)
• Sharpening
• Lens shading correction
• Distortion correction
• Chromatic aberration correction (CAC)
• Camera control
• Anti flickering
• Tone mapping
• Exposure compensation

In challenging lighting conditions, noise causes problems with image quality. Visionary.ai offers real-time video denoiser technology to enable full-color imaging in low light. Noise removal can reduce the cost and size of image sensors, reduce the energy wasted in illumination, increase the frame rate, or improve the dynamic range. Visionary.ai's technology works with the sensor's raw data before any processing occurs and data is discarded. When images are compressed and smoothed, they prevent the use of temporal information between successive frames. With raw Bayer image sensor output, Visionary.ai's denoiser identifies and removes noise. The company also states that its efficient denoiser technology can run on cost-effective, low-power infrastructure at the edge.

Visionary.ai was founded in December 2020 by Oren Debbi (CEO) and Yoav Taieb (CTO). Debbi previously worked as the EMEA senior sales manager at computer vision company Applitools. Before starting Visionary.ai, Taieb worked at Mobileye in R&D, developing advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and holding the position of head of traffic sign recognition and lighting (TSR). Taieb has worked on over forty patents in the fields of computer vision and AI. The idea for the company came during the COVID-19 pandemic when Debbi was frustrated by the performance of his laptop webcam. The company was founded with the mission of enabling high-quality digital imaging regardless of circumstances, in particular, situations with limited visibility.

On April 22, 2021, Visionary.ai announced it had closed a $4.5 million seed round led by Ibex Investors with the participation of Spring Ventures led by Aviv Refuah, Capital Point of Yossi Tamar, and additional investors. Upon the announcement, the company announced it had major contracts with industrial and consumer electronics manufacturers in both Israel and the US. Later reports stated the company's initial seed round took place in February 2021. In March 2022, Visionary.ai announced that investors Ibex, Spring Ventures, and Capital Point had opted to increase their funding by $2.5 million, bringing the total raised to $7 million.

Visionary.ai unveiled its new AI-based ISP at CES in Las Vegas on May 1, 2022. In a press release about the new ISP, the company stated they had already earned more in revenue than the total capital raised, and their headcount had increased 300% in the previous six months. CTO Taieb described the company's new technology:

Our ISP now delivers results in under 0.1 lux, which means we can essentially detect full-colour images and video in situations of almost complete darkness. For context, a full moon typically provides only about 0.05–0.1 lux, so this is a meaningful milestone, meaning we can achieve high image quality under lighting as minimal as moonlight.

In July 2022, Visionary.ai was announced as the winner of a $1 million investment after receiving first place in a competition organized by Together Investments and Tel Aviv-based television Channel 13. The competition, called The Roadshow, involved 300 start-ups that had all raised at least $5 million in funding.

On November 22, 2022, Visionary.ai announced it had received a multi-million-dollar investment from National Grid Partners (NGP), the venture investment and innovation arm of National Grid plc. Lisa Lambert, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at National Grid and Founder and President of National Grid Partners said:

Electricity grids by their nature incorporate many geographically distributed assets that need to be monitored for safety, security and signs of damage or malfunction. The transition to renewable energy sources drives this distribution of assets even further. Vision is critical to monitoring these assets, and cameras need to be dependable in all lighting and weather conditions. The technology that Visionary.ai is developing can help with the need for increased security of electricity supply and the battle against climate change.

On September 13, 2023, Visionary.ai launched its real-time video denoiser for improving video image quality. The company states its denoiser algorithms are efficient enough to be deployed on cost-effective silicon at the edge of a network. Visionary.ai's denoiser has been benchmarked against other approaches, with results showing the only comparable denoising performance (Restormer) required considerable computer processing power and took 212 times longer to execute. The denoiser uses the image sensors raw output data before it has been compressed or degraded by any post-processing. It is designed to work alongside the company’s software ISP. On October 26, 2023, Visionary.ai announced a collaboration with Qualcomm at its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. The chip manufacturer unveiled the Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform, featuring support for Visionary.ai's night vision technology. Running on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered reference design, Visionary.ai's software makes it possible to capture full-color video in conditions as dark as 0.2 lux. Visionary.ai CEO Debbi stated:

We are thrilled to work with Qualcomm Technologies to introduce true night vision technology to the world... Our collaboration has pushed the boundaries of what smartphones can achieve in low-light conditions, giving users the ability to capture vivid, full-color moments even in the darkest environments. We believe this will change the way people think about smartphone photography and open up new creative possibilities.

Discussing the launch, Judd Heape, VP of Product Management at Qualcomm, said:

We're excited for Visionary.ai to offer this new feature to our customers to enable a remarkable low-light experience for consumers. We've worked hard to enable the technology on our Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered reference smartphone in order to yield the best results, so that smartphone manufacturers can enjoy a smooth out-of-the-box experience.