RPT-Ceva, Mitsui invest in gesture technology firm

TEL AVIV Nov 22 (Reuters) - Israeli mobile chip company Ceva has made a minority equity investment together with Mitsui & Co Global Investment of Japan in eyeSight Mobile Technologies, which makes touch-free interfaces for smartphones, tablets, PCs and other digital devices.

The technologies allow users to control phones, computers or other digital devices with hand gestures by using a built-in camera and real-time image processing.

It means people will be able to use their phone or TV without having to touch them. So TV channels, for example, could be changed with a few simple gestures.

Under the agreement, eyeSight will offer its technologies, including gesture recognition and finger tracking software, to users of Ceva's image signal processing (ISP) and video platform.

Companies such as Intel, Broadcom, Spreadtrum and ST Ericsson license Ceva's technology to build chips known as digital signal processors.

Ceva said it can supply an ultra-low power, software-based product, enabling the cost-efficient deployment of gesture recognition technology in mass market devices.

"This equity investment in eyeSight is aimed at expanding the addressable markets for our Ceva-MM3000 platform to include the burgeoning embedded vision and scene analysis arenas," Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of Ceva, said on Tuesday.

Gesture recognition applications are complex and pose a burden on the central processing unit's performance and power consumption. By offloading gesture technologies to Ceva's processor, it is estimated that the system's power efficiency can be improved by a factor of 20, crucial for any battery powered device, Ceva said.

The Ceva-MM3000 multimedia processor is aimed at smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and set-top boxes.

Israel-based eyeSight, whose clients include China's Hisense, raised $4.2 million from Ceva and Mitsui.