Ultra low light WDR camera streams full HD

Ashok Babu, President of e-con Systems, stated: “Named after Greek God of Light, Hyperyon is e-con’s hyper low light camera and our first ever H.264 USB UVC camera with many advanced features all packaged in a single camera. The Hyperyon is an ideal camera for customers looking for cameras for challenging outdoor lighting conditions or extremely low light conditions, smart parking lot management, embedded vision, mining, digital microscopy, kiosks, video conferencing and many such applications. With its unmatched image quality, onboard H.264 compression capability, the Hyperyon camera will now benefit our customers than ever before.”

Being Socionext Camera Ecosystem Partner, e-con Systems has close working relationship with Socionext right from its first reference design kit Tania. e-con Systems has now worked with Socionext to develop the Hyperyon camera, leveraging the advanced features of Socionext ISP for capturing high-quality images under low light conditions such as Three-Dimensional Noise Reduction (3DNR) and the WDR technology. 

Hyperyon has been fine-tuned for achieving image quality under various lighting conditions including near darkness from IMX290 sensor with combination of Socionext ISP which has a built-in HEVC encoder, allowing H.264-quality images to be transmitted at half bit-rate.

The IMX290 sensor used in Hyperyon is SONY STARVIS Series 1/2.8” type image sensor with 2.13 million effective pixels. By bringing out low light performance of Sony IMX290 sensor in combination with Socionext ISP, Hyperyon camera produces images in nearly absolute darkness conditions of 0.002 Lux. Hyperyon is also optimised for Near Infrared (NIR) making it suitable for NIR imaging. Combined with 3DOL HDR technology, Hyperyon camera is a suitable camera for 24/7 surveillance applications.

e-con Systems provides sample Windows application (e-CAMView) and Linux application (QtCAM) which uses the standard UVC protocol to access the camera controls. e-CAMView is a Windows Media Foundation based image viewer application which enables controls such as Digital Zoom (up to 16x), Exposure (auto and manual), White Balance (auto and manual), Gain, Sharpness Enhancement, Brightness, Contrast and various other controls. 

The extension unit enables controls for WDR (2DOL and 3DOL), De-Noise, High Conversion Gain/Low Conversion Gain (HCG/LCG), Bit Rate control for H264, Q-Factor control for MJPEG and GPIO header for expansion capability and so on. The exposure time and noise reduction level can be adjusted manually. QtCAM is an Open source Linux camera software application which enables capturing and viewing video from devices supported by Linux UVC driver and works with any V4L2 compatible device.

The Hyperyon camera is currently available for evaluation.