Inaugural I3A VISION 2020 Award Winners Unveiled

CogniSign Wins Gold Award; Tessera Silver; imsense Bronze at I3A 63rd Annual Conference

Wakefield, Mass. (Vocus) November 11, 2009 -- I3A has announced the initial winners of its new awards program, the VISION 2020 Imaging Innovation Awards, to attendees at I3A’s interactive, technology-focused 63rd Annual Conference, which took place November 9-10 in Monterey, California. The winners demonstrated their innovative applications in a special session on Tuesday.

I3A (the International Imaging Industry Association; http://www.i3a.org) is the leading global association for the imaging industry. The VISION 2020 Imaging Innovation Awards is a new initiative to energize, recognize and celebrate innovators whose ideas will drive the industry toward a vision of the future of intelligent imaging. Details about the VISION 2020 Initiative and Awards can be found at http://www.i3a.org/about-i3a/awards/vision2020/.

The VISION 2020 panel of judges selected three companies' innovative technologies from a pool of submissions:

- Gold: CogniSign Inc. (http://www.cognisign.com/) of San Francisco, for its image search technology platform that seeks to solve the "images are a black box” problem found in a wide variety of consumer Internet and mobile applications. CogniSign’s technology extracts visual meaning from the arrangement of the pixels themselves, by using computer vision, to both find similar content and to decipher the subject matter of the image.
- Silver: Tessera (http://www.tessera.com/) of San Jose, California, for its latest Imaging & Optics demonstrator: a wireless “smart” camera module in a toy. The demonstrator includes a VGA wafer-level camera that integrates the company’s wafer-level optics and image sensor packaging, face and smile detection technologies. Combined, these technologies enable the toy to detect multiple faces and provide appropriate responses, from making happy sounds when a new face appears, to laughing when a face smiles.
- Bronze: imsense ltd. (http://www.im-sense.com/) of Cambridge, UK, for its eye-fidelity™ Dynamic Range Correction technology, particularly as applied to video content processing. It automatically optimizes a video's brightness and contrast, revealing all details, while perfectly respecting the color balance, with the result that people “see what they saw” when they captured their videos.
"These unique innovations give us glimpses into a future where computer vision is increasingly used in creative ways, not only to replicate human vision, but to extend it to new planes, becoming seamlessly and effortlessly integrated into our daily lives," said Lisa Walker, I3A President. "We hope that the inaugural VISION 2020 awards will help to promote progress towards our future vision and will highlight the unique opportunities arising from the human visual experience. I3A is proud to honor these three creative technology companies."

VISION 2020 Awards Criteria
VISION 2020 Imaging Innovation Awards are given to those individuals, teams, organizations or companies whose product or service innovations enable the future vision. All entries must be imaging-related, but a broad view of imaging is used. An innovation may be drawn from the areas of capturing, storing, sharing, managing, processing or printing, among others.

The Vision 2020 entries were evaluated based on each submission's relevance to the imaging industry, its potential market impact (does it solve a significant market problem?), the method of impact (how does it bring change to the market?), its uniqueness and its implementation status (how real is it? are there patents, beta programs or proof of concept?).

VISION 2020 judges are an independent panel that includes Christopher Chute, IDC; Philippe Kahn, Fullpower; Mark Kalow, Soquel Group; and George Schaub, Shutterbug.

About the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A)
I3A's vision is to enable the use of imaging to simplify and enrich people's lives through visual experiences that connect generations, communities, information and services. I3A drives the global imaging industry toward this future by bringing members together to create standards and collaborate on initiatives that advance the industry and remove barriers to growth.

I3A is an accredited Standards Developing Organization, serving as Secretariat for the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 42 (ISO/TC42) on Photography, and as administrator for the USA Technical Advisory Group for this committee. Information about I3A can be found at http://www.i3a.org or by phone at +1 914-285-4933. For information on joining I3A, please write or call Noel Mareno, noelm(at)i3a(dot)org, +1 214-244-1927.

I3A Press Contact
Judith Vanderkay
Virtual, Inc.
jvanderkay(at)virtualmgmt(dot)com
+1-781-876-6208

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Virtual, Inc. for I3A
Judith Vanderkay
+1-781-876-6208
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