WiseEye – Enabled Energy-Saving Smart Office Solution to Debut at CES 2023

Himax Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: HIMX) (“Himax” or “Company”), a leading supplier and fabless manufacturer of display drivers and other semiconductor products, today announced a collaboration with Wentai Technology, a leading lighting manufacturing company which offers cutting edge technology of industry 4.0 smart manufacturing, smart lighting, and AI digital power, to exhibit an innovative smart office solution featuring occupancy management enabled by Himax WiseEye™ smart image sensing solution (“WiseEye”) at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The smart office solution incorporates Himax WiseEye total solution, including ultralow power WE1 AI processor, HM0360 always-on CMOS image sensor and proprietary occupancy management AI algorithm. The occupancy management AI conducts people presence detection, people counting and location in an office with ultralow power consumption, transmitting only byte-sized metadata output to larger back-end systems or cloud servers for further statistical analysis. With no large-scale raw image transmission, the smart office solution can operate in a low-bandwidth network environment with reduced energy consumption while providing increased security and privacy protection.

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At CES, Himax and Wentai will provide a live showcase of the smart office solution. The demonstration will provide an illustration of people entering an office, the occupancy management AI device immediately detecting their presence and automatically activating the lightings, air conditioners, and/or smart office facilities in the workspace accordingly. Based on the number of people and their location in the office, the device can justify the quantity or brightness of lights, as well as the room temperature and fan direction of the air conditioner. When the device detects an empty office, it will automatically turn off office facilities to save energy. The AI device, equipped with an always-on, low-frame rate (about 3 – 5 FPS) and low-lux (about 1 lux) camera along with the ultralow power occupancy AI sensing, enables the realization of an around-the-clock smart battery-powered office AIoT gadget. In a darkroom scenario, the AI solution offers supplementary features in voice command recognition and/or IR fill light patch to assist sensing operations. When compared to a conventional infrared light sensor, the occupancy management device incorporating always-on ultralow power WiseEye technology delivers more accurate human occupancy detection, which can effectively filter out false alarms and avoid mis-operation. The WE1 processor also supports all necessary house-keeping tasks of the system, eliminating the extra cost for a MCU for the same purpose.

“As concern for the environment increases globally, the prioritization of energy savings is rapidly growing resulting in expanding demand for intelligent office management technology. Himax’s WiseEye total solution featuring ultralow power and easy-to-design characteristics, coupled with our leading lighting and office management technology provides a smart office solution that can work in a low bandwidth environment. We believe our smart office solution outperforms others currently available in the marketplace and is more aligned with enterprise ESG frameworks, establishing a win-win partnership for Himax and Wentai,” said Steven Wang, VP, Sales & Technical Chief at Wentai.

“We are excited to work alongside Wentai as yet another demonstration of the flexibility of our WiseEye solution which allows for the development of a variety of AI use cases by leveraging ultralow power consumption and superb computing efficiency. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration towards the advancement of smart AI office applications and improved corporate sustainability practices,” said Mark Chen, Vice president of WiseEye Smart Image Sensing business at Himax.

Source: GlobeNewswire