WiMi Hologram Cloud Inc (WIMI)

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The 100 billion blue ocean lidar market has become a "competitive ground", WiMi Hologram announced the development of "WiMi HoloPulse LiDAR" to expand the holographic application market.

source
https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/relnews/us/2021-03-17/doc-ikkntiam3718945.shtml

March 17, 2021 10:55 CCTIME

Since the advent of the 5G era, the progress of driverless cars has also accelerated. Among them, lidar technology is particularly important.

With the continuous iterative update of technology, the intelligentization of automobiles has become closer and closer to us. "Intelligent Connected Vehicle Technology Roadmap 2.0" proposes that by 2025, L2 and L3 equivalent partially automated driving (PA) and conditional automated driving (CA) will account for more than 50% of car sales, and highly automated driving ( HA, equivalent to L4) began to enter the market.

As a "what you see is what you get" sensor, lidar can enhance the redundancy of the sensing system and supplement the scenes where millimeter wave radar and cameras are missing. It is a standard configuration for high-end autonomous driving. Judging from the current research data in the industry, lidar is on the eve of its outbreak.

Unlike camera-based solutions, lidar solutions enable machines to see 3D images by providing accurate distance measurement of surrounding objects. Lidar solutions use a series of lasers to measure the distance in the environment at the speed of light. In low light conditions, lidar also performs better than cameras and produces fewer errors. Compared with radar, lidar provides better resolution and can perceive the shape of objects, thereby obtaining better mark detection and classification. According to a report from the American Automobile Association, current pedestrian detection systems are relatively ineffective in protecting pedestrians and bicycles, especially at night. The lidar system can detect pedestrians well during the day and night, because the lidar system provides self-illumination through the laser beam. These advantages of lidar, coupled with lower computing power requirements, enable the platform to make decisions quickly and accurately to reduce collisions.

What is Lidar
In terms of technical principles, lidar can be divided into four major systems:
Laser emission, laser reception, beam manipulation and information processing. The working principle is to use laser transmitter and beam scanning technology to emit laser light between infrared and visible light. The time difference and phase difference of the laser signal describe the three-dimensional point cloud image of the surrounding objects, so as to obtain accurate distance and contour information.

In 2019, the global market size of lidar is about 1.65 billion U.S. dollars. The agency predicts that it is expected to exceed 10 billion U.S. dollars by 2025 and reach 24 billion U.S. dollars in 2030, corresponding to 36% (2019-2025) and 28% (2019--2025). 2030) CAGR.

Looking to the future, what can really promote the expansion of the lidar market is its application in the automotive field. When intelligent driving became the main battlefield of car companies, the "Vision System" used cameras to achieve high-end autonomous driving with AI algorithms, and Tesla's NOA was quickly introduced to the market to make the "Vision System" become the current mainstream. However, the vision solution still has a bottleneck and requires a large amount of data accumulation and processing. Unlike the vision solution, which focuses on analysis, the lidar can directly model objects and road conditions through active detection, which greatly reduces the difficulty of analysis in the vision solution.

According to Bloomberg News, another technology giant Apple is in active dialogue with a number of LiDAR (lidar) sensor suppliers to realize a key technology in the development of its autonomous driving Apple Car. LiDAR sensors enable the car’s computer to "see "The surrounding environment.

Bloomberg said that Apple has been working on driverless car projects for many years and has developed most of the necessary software, underlying processors and artificial intelligence algorithms for this complex system. What Apple is looking for is the hardware equipment that matches with it.

According to reports, ongoing discussions indicate that Apple has not yet identified a preferred supplier of LiDAR, and during the development process, Apple may consider a variety of options, including highly customized sensors.

As a global AI visual holographic AR representative company, Weibo and other institutions with a strategic investment of 61.58 million US dollars, the recent performance of WiMi Hologram is also eye-catching. China Mobile and the media cloud platform holographic remote interaction won the bid, and as a technology provider of 5G holographic communication, it was once again selected by operators. In the field of lidar, it seems that it is also catching up. Since the announcement of the patent of the 3D holographic pulse laser processing device for optical holography, many industry application customers have shown strong market demand, so WiMi Hologram decided to develop 3D holography Pulse Lidar product "WiMi HoloPulse LiDAR" to further expand the company's holographic product portfolio matrix.

WiMi HoloPulse LiDAR is a multifunctional holographic pulse 3D solid-state lidar. The goal is to reach a long detection distance of more than 200m and capture high-resolution 3D holographic images. LiDAR uses MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) micro galvanometer to provide high resolution, long detection range and wide field of view. Through dynamic control, LiDAR can flexibly adjust the vertical resolution and frame rate, for example, allowing the focus area to be dynamically defined. LiDAR uses solid-state silicon detectors, which can reliably detect weak reflections from distant objects and strong reflections from close objects. Digital signal processing is to determine the precise position in the three-dimensional space through filtering, correlation and statistical analysis. The point cloud generated by the LiDAR sensor can map the sensor environment in 3D. A single point cloud can be composed of tens of thousands of distance points (single distance measurement), which contains holographic data of 3D original environment information. The software stack extracts a lot of abstract information from the holographic data, transmits commands to the actuator through deep neural network control, and presents 3D holographic data.

The WiMi HoloPulse LiDAR LiDAR solution provides software development kits that match the hardware products, including target detection, classification, and counting functions. Combined with software recognition algorithms, it can provide solutions for many fields (autonomous driving, environment perception, 3D holographic imaging, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), traffic management, 3D printing, etc.), and quickly expand the application market of holographic technology.

Public information shows that WiMi focuses on holographic cloud services, mainly in the professional fields of vehicle AR holographic HUD, 3D holographic pulse LiDAR, head-mounted light field holographic equipment, holographic semiconductor, holographic cloud software, holographic car navigation, etc. Covering multiple links from holographic AR technology, 3D holographic pulse LiDAR technology, holographic vision semiconductor technology, holographic software development, holographic AR advertising technology, holographic AR entertainment technology, holographic ARSDK payment, interactive holographic communication Holographic cloud comprehensive technical solution provider.

Research data shows that in 2025, 6 million new cars worldwide will be equipped with lidar, and the penetration rate of L3 autonomous driving in passenger cars will reach 6%. According to Sullivan’s estimates, the market size of automotive-grade lidar will reach US$4.61 billion in 2025, with a compound growth rate of 83.7% from 2019 to 2025.

For intelligent technology, lidar is equivalent to "eyes". With the rapid development of industries such as intelligent robots, unmanned driving, drones, medical imaging, and the Internet of Things, the lidar market will grow substantially.