Today, with the popularity of AI, more and more innovative applications need to be assisted by machine vision, and the premise of using AI to “understand” is that the equipment must be able to see and see clearly. In this process, the optical lens The importance is self-evident, among which AI intelligence in the security industry is the most typical.

With the deepening of the application of security AI technology, the technical upgrade of the security lens, which is a key component of surveillance cameras, seems to be inevitable. From the perspective of the development trend of the video surveillance system, the technical upgrade route of the security lens is mainly manifested in the following aspects:

Reliability vs. Lens Cost

The reliability of the security lens mainly refers to the heat resistance of the system. Surveillance cameras need to work in extreme weather conditions. A good surveillance lens needs to maintain focus at 60-70 degrees Celsius without visible image distortion. But at the same time, the market is moving from glass lenses to glass-plastic hybrid lenses (which means mixing aspherical plastic lenses with glass) to improve resolution and reduce costs.

Resolution vs Bandwidth Cost

Compared with other camera lenses, surveillance lenses generally do not require high resolution; the current mainstream is 1080P (= 2MP) which will still increase from about 65% currently to 72% market share in 2020. Since bandwidth costs are still very important in current systems, resolution upgrades will increase system construction and operating costs. It is expected that the progress of 4K upgrades in the next few years will be very slow until 5G construction is completed.

From fixed focus to high power zoom

Security lenses can be divided into fixed focus and zoom. The current mainstream is still fixed focus, but zoom lenses accounted for 30% of the market in 2016, and will grow to more than 40% of the market by 2020. Usually 3x zoom is enough for use, but a higher zoom factor is still required for longer distance monitoring.

Large aperture solves low-light environment applications

Since security lenses are often used in low-light environments, the requirements for large apertures are much higher than those for mobile phone lenses. Although infrared imaging can also be used to solve the problem of nighttime imaging, it can only provide black and white video, so a large aperture combined with high-sensitivity RGB CMOS is the fundamental solution to low-light environment applications. The current mainstream lenses are sufficient for indoor environments and outdoor environments during the day, and starlight-level (F 1.6) and black-light-level (F 0.98) large aperture lenses have been developed for nighttime environments.

Today, as electronic technology is more and more widely used, optical lenses, as the “eyes” of machines, are now expanding into many new application fields. In addition to the three major business markets of security, mobile phones, and vehicles, as the main acquisition component of optical signals, optical lenses have become important components of emerging terminal electronic products such as AI recognition, projection video, smart home, virtual reality, and laser projection. . For different electronic devices, the optical lenses carried by them are also slightly different in terms of form and technical standards.

Lens Features in Different Application Fields

Smart Home Lenses

With the improvement of people’s living standards year by year, smart homes have now entered thousands of households. Smart home devices represented by home cameras/smart peepholes/video doorbells/sweeping robots provide a variety of carriers for optical lenses to enter the smart home market. Smart home devices are flexible and compact, and can be adapted to black and white all-weather work. The appeal of optical lenses is mainly focused on high resolution, large aperture, low distortion, and high cost performance. Basic standard of production.

Drone or UAV camera lenses

The rise of consumer drone equipment has opened up the “God’s perspective” gameplay for everyday photography. The use environment of UAVs is mainly outdoors. Long-distance, wide viewing angles, and the ability to cope with complex outdoor environments have put forward high requirements for the lens design of UAVs. Several functions that the UAV camera lens should have include fog penetration, noise reduction, wide dynamic range, automatic day and night conversion, and spherical privacy area masking functions.

The flight environment is complex, and the drone lens needs to switch the shooting mode freely according to the sight environment at any time, so as to ensure the excellence of the shooting picture. In this process, a zoom lens is also necessary. The combination of zoom lens and flying equipment, high-altitude flight can also take into account the rapid switching between wide-angle shooting and close-up capture.

Handheld camera lens

The live broadcast industry is hot. In order to better adapt to live broadcast work in different scenarios, portable smart camera products have also emerged as the times require. High-definition, anti-shake, and distortion-free have become the reference standards for this type of camera. In addition, in order to pursue a better photogenic effect, it is also necessary to meet the color reproduction effect, what you see is what you shoot, and ultra-wide dynamic adaptation to meet all-weather shooting of life scenes.

Video equipments

The outbreak of the new crown epidemic has brought about the further development of online conferences and live classrooms. Because the use environment is relatively fixed and single, the design standards of this type of lens are basically not very special. As the “glasses” of video equipment, the lens of video equipment generally meets the applications of large angle, no distortion, high definition, and zoom Just need it. With the increasing popularity of related applications in the fields of remote training, telemedicine, remote assistance, and collaborative office, the output of such lenses is also increasing.

At present, security, mobile phones, and vehicles are the three major business markets for optical lenses. With the diversification of public lifestyles, some emerging and more subdivided downstream markets for optical lenses are also growing, such as projectors, AR / VR equipment, etc., focusing on visual technology and art, bringing different feelings to the life and work of the general public.