Itseez, double Intel Company
Intel, like other corporations, constantly buys and sells businesses - there is nothing unusual in this. However, the purchase of a Russian company for it is an extremely unusual event. And the purchase itself is extraordinary. This post is about the latest acquisition of Intel - the company Itseez, known primarily for its key role in the development of the OpenCV library.
Obviously, sight is required not only to a person, it is one of the basic elements of autonomy and intellectuality - that is, in order for a device to be independently oriented in the existing situation and make decisions, it should not just look, but see. Overcoming the distance between the meanings of these two words for more than 10 years was taken by the Itseez company, whose name in English sounds literally “It sees”.
So, this year, Itseez again became part of Intel . Why again?
Itseez (originally the Argus Computer Vision Center) was founded by three former employees of the Nizhny Novgorod Intel Development Center: Viktor Erukhimov, Sergey Molinov and Alexander Bovyrin. Having become familiar with the process of collaborating on the computer vision library OpenCV at Intel, in 2005 they decided to establish their own startup. In 2013, Alexey Miakov joined Itseez in the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), who in 2015 became the CEO and co-founder of the company, and in 2016 played a key role in the sale of Itseez.
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For 10 years, the company has grown greatly, mainly due to young people, at the beginning of 2016 it employed more than 100 people. Being located in Nizhny Novgorod, a major academic and IT center in Russia, Itseez actively worked with students and young professionals, conducting various training activities for them, such as the School for Optimizing the Performance of Computer Vision Algorithms, and participating in the Google Summer of Code. And, of course, the founders of Itseez were not the only former employees of Intel in the company. Over the years, for a variety of reasons, Itseez has transferred a dozen qualified employees of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of Intel.
Continuing to remain the main developer of the open library of machine vision OpenCV, Itseez has found its use in various fields. The professional interests of the company's team include:
In addition, from the very beginning of the birth of OpenVX - the standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision functionality, intended primarily for embedded systems and real-time systems - and until October 2016, Viktor Erukhimov was the chairman of the OpenVX working group at Khronos. By the way, quite recently an extension for working with neural networks was added to the standard.
Team Itseez in 2015
But this is a social activity. And Itseez earned money working under contract agreements with many leaders of the IT industry, such as ... Intel. It is a pity that information about these projects is not public, and we cannot say what famous products of world corporations are made in Russia.
But we will briefly tell you about the main products and technologies with which Itseez has enriched Intel (according to the information from the Itseez website, which is no longer there, but the Internet remembers everything).
Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) - intelligent driver assistant. At the moment, such functions as pedestrian recognition, collision warning with the vehicle in front, recognition of important road signs, detection of dividing lines and the fact of their crossing, including in poor visibility conditions, are implemented.
Facense - a system of high-precision analysis and transformation of the face. It allows you to find faces in the frame, determine up to 76 characteristics of each person, as well as determine gender, age, and emotional state. Among analogues it is distinguished by extremely high speed, the ability to work in various lighting conditions, taking into account such factors as emotions, glasses, vegetation.
itSeez3D - Mobile 3D scanning software for people and objects. Exists in versions 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 camera RealSense. By the way, some time before the deal with Intel, the itSeez3D development team under the leadership of Viktor Erukhimov separated into a separate company and remained autonomous - maybe there are people who want to buy it?
With the acquisition of Itseez, Intel has once again demonstrated how much attention the company pays to the creation of intelligent 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, in our blog we will mark the deal by joining posts from the former blog of the Itseez company. Here is a list of the most interesting ones in our opinion.
Anyone interested in the topic of computer vision is recommended to re-read them - the guys know what they wrote about, and it is not for nothing that even Wikipedia refers to them.
Obviously, sight is required not only to a person, it is one of the basic elements of autonomy and intellectuality - that is, in order for a device to be independently oriented in the existing situation and make decisions, it should not just look, but see. Overcoming the distance between the meanings of these two words for more than 10 years was taken by the Itseez company, whose name in English sounds literally “It sees”.
So, this year, Itseez again became part of Intel . Why again?
Itseez (originally the Argus Computer Vision Center) was founded by three former employees of the Nizhny Novgorod Intel Development Center: Viktor Erukhimov, Sergey Molinov and Alexander Bovyrin. Having become familiar with the process of collaborating on the computer vision library OpenCV at Intel, in 2005 they decided to establish their own startup. In 2013, Alexey Miakov joined Itseez in the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), who in 2015 became the CEO and co-founder of the company, and in 2016 played a key role in the sale of Itseez.
')
For 10 years, the company has grown greatly, mainly due to young people, at the beginning of 2016 it employed more than 100 people. Being located in Nizhny Novgorod, a major academic and IT center in Russia, Itseez actively worked with students and young professionals, conducting various training activities for them, such as the School for Optimizing the Performance of Computer Vision Algorithms, and participating in the Google Summer of Code. And, of course, the founders of Itseez were not the only former employees of Intel in the company. Over the years, for a variety of reasons, Itseez has transferred a dozen qualified employees of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of Intel.
Continuing to remain the main developer of the open library of machine vision OpenCV, Itseez has found its use in various fields. The professional interests of the company's team include:
- Computer vision based car safety systems
- intelligent video surveillance systems
- 3D (stereo, reconstruction),
- scene recognition, object detection / classification,
- deep / machine learning (deep / machine learning),
- convolutional neural networks (convolutional neuron networks),
- virtual / augmented reality,
In addition, from the very beginning of the birth of OpenVX - the standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision functionality, intended primarily for embedded systems and real-time systems - and until October 2016, Viktor Erukhimov was the chairman of the OpenVX working group at Khronos. By the way, quite recently an extension for working with neural networks was added to the standard.
Team Itseez in 2015
But this is a social activity. And Itseez earned money working under contract agreements with many leaders of the IT industry, such as ... Intel. It is a pity that information about these projects is not public, and we cannot say what famous products of world corporations are made in Russia.
But we will briefly tell you about the main products and technologies with which Itseez has enriched Intel (according to the information from the Itseez website, which is no longer there, but the Internet remembers everything).
Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) - intelligent driver assistant. At the moment, such functions as pedestrian recognition, collision warning with the vehicle in front, recognition of important road signs, detection of dividing lines and the fact of their crossing, including in poor visibility conditions, are implemented.
Facense - a system of high-precision analysis and transformation of the face. It allows you to find faces in the frame, determine up to 76 characteristics of each person, as well as determine gender, age, and emotional state. Among analogues it is distinguished by extremely high speed, the ability to work in various lighting conditions, taking into account such factors as emotions, glasses, vegetation.
itSeez3D - Mobile 3D scanning software for people and objects. Exists in versions 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 camera RealSense. By the way, some time before the deal with Intel, the itSeez3D development team under the leadership of Viktor Erukhimov separated into a separate company and remained autonomous - maybe there are people who want to buy it?
With the acquisition of Itseez, Intel has once again demonstrated how much attention the company pays to the creation of intelligent 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, in our blog we will mark the deal by joining posts from the former blog of the Itseez company. Here is a list of the most interesting ones in our opinion.
- A brief history of the project OpenCV
- OpenVX: computer vision standard
- How we ported OpenCV to WindowsRT
- Overview of segmentation algorithms
Anyone interested in the topic of computer vision is recommended to re-read them - the guys know what they wrote about, and it is not for nothing that even Wikipedia refers to them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/314794/
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