Single MIPI interface can be shared by both front and rear cameras of smart phones

OmniVision Technologies has developed Video-in-Video (ViV) technology, a dual-camera video sharing technology that allows for the combination of video feeds from both the front- and rear-facing cameras into a single video stream. This technology allows simultaneous streaming two video signals. ViV technology helps smart phone and tablet computer manufacturers to offer video sharing advantage to its customers without making any major changes to existing designs or operating systems.

“After two years of development and fine-tuning, we are bringing to market a technology that we believe can truly enhance the way people record and share video and images on smartphones and tablets,” said Henrik Miettinen, product marketing manager at OmniVision. “Given the explosive growth of image and video sharing on social networks, as well as the popularity of video chat and conferencing on mobile devices, we see ViV as an enabler to the next trend in mobile video, making it a highly attractive solution to our customers as well as to end-users.”

OmniVision’s ViV technology is built on a master/slave configuration where a primary 5-megapixel camera (such as the OV5645 or the OV5648) can share its MIPI interface with an attached secondary VGA camera (such as the OV7695). Using stitching and bypass modes, the primary camera can send via its MIPI interface either combined or slave-only images or video to the baseband, with or without image signal processing, thus requiring only one MIPI camera interface to support dual-cameras.