With the popularity of AI today, more and more innovative applications need to be assisted by machine vision. The premise of AI effectiveness "can see" is that the device can see and see clearly. The importance of optical lens in this process is self-evident, especially in the security industry. With the deepening of the application of security AI technology, the technical upgrade of security lens, the key component of surveillance camera, seems to be inevitable. From the development trend of video monitoring system, the technical upgrade route of security lens mainly manifests in the following aspects:

Security Lens Technology Upgrade Route

Reliability and lens cost: Reliability of safety lens mainly refers to the heat resistance of the system. Monitoring cameras need to work in extreme weather conditions. A good surveillance lens needs to 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 aspheric plastic lenses with glass) to improve resolution and reduce costs.

From fixed focus to high zoom: Security lens can be divided into fixed focus and zoom. The current mainstream is still fixed focus. Usually a 3-fold zoom is sufficient for use.

Large aperture for low light environment applications: Because security lens often needs to be used in low light environment, the requirements for large aperture are much higher than for mobile phone lens. Although infrared imaging can also be used to solve night imaging problems, it can only provide black-and-white video, so large aperture combined with highly sensitive RGB CMOS is the fundamental solution to low light environment applications. Current mainstream lenses are adequate for indoor and Daytime Outdoor environments. Large aperture lenses with star (F 1.6) and black (F 0.8) levels have been developed for night environments.

Today, with the wider application of electronic technology, optical lens as the "eye" of the machine, is now expanding into many new applications. In addition to security, mobile phone, car and other three major business markets, optical lens has become an important component of new terminal electronic products such as AI recognition, projection video, smart home, virtual reality, laser projection and so on, as the main collection component of optical signals. For different electronic devices, the optical lenses carried by them also have slight differences in morphology and technical standards.

This is illustrated by the lens features of smart home, video equipment and unmanned aerial vehicle.

Smart home lens

With the improvement of people's living standard year by year, smart home has now entered thousands of households. Smart home devices such as home cameras/smart cat's eyes/visible doorbells/sweeper robots provide a wide range of carriers for optical lens to enter the smart home market. Smart home equipment is flexible and compact, and can adapt to the black and white work all day long. The demand of optical lens mainly focuses on high pixels, large aperture, low distortion, high performance-price ratio, etc. High-definition shooting, low night vision, wide field depth design become the basic standards of smart home research and development.

Unmanned aerial vehicle lens

The rise of consumer drone devices has opened up the use of "God's Perspective" in daily photography. The usage environment of UAV is mainly outdoor. The long distance, wide viewing angle and the ability to cope with the complex outdoor environment put forward many requirements for the lens design of UAV.

Some of the features that an unmanned aerial camera lens should have include fog clearance, noise reduction, wide dynamics, automatic day-to-night conversion, and spherical privacy area screening. Because of the complex flight environment, the unmanned aerial vehicle lens needs to switch the shooting mode freely according to the line-of-sight environment at any time in order to ensure the superiority of the shooting picture. In this process, zoom lens is also necessary, the combination of zoom lens and aircraft, high altitude flight can also take into account the fast switching between wide angle shooting and feature capture.

Handheld Camera Lens

Lightweight smart camera products have emerged to better adapt to the live broadcasting work in different scenarios due to the fire of the live broadcasting industry. HD, anti-shake, no distortion become the reference standard for these cameras. In addition, in order to pursue a better mirror effect, it also needs to satisfy the color restoration effect, see-as-you-see and ultra-wide dynamic adaptation, to satisfy all-weather shooting of life scenes.

Video Equipment

The outbreak of the new crown epidemic has led to the further development of online meetings and live classes. Because the use environment is relatively fixed and single, this kind of lens has little special characteristics in design standard. As the "glasses" of video equipment, the lens of video equipment can generally meet the application requirements of large angle, no distortion, high definition, zoom. With the popularity of related applications such as remote training, telemedicine, remote assistance, collaborative office, etc., the output of such lenses is also increasing.

At present, security, mobile phone and car are the three main business markets of optical lens. Along with the diversification of people's lifestyle, some new and more subdivided downstream markets of optical lens are also growing up, such as projectors, AR/VR devices, etc. Focusing on visual technology and art, bringing different feelings to the life and work of the general public.