South Korea’s LG Innotek has invested in Taiwanese lens manufacturer AOE Optronics to create lenses for autonomous vehicle (AV) cameras. 

AOE Optronics creates aspherical glass lenses for AVs and has committed to increasing its supply of the lenses to the US market. 

Optical cameras are a vital part of AVs and allow the cars to sense the world around them. Cameras can help an AV accurately determine how far away objects are and can help with navigation. 

In AVs, optical cameras are usually paired with image-processing algorithms to infer contextual information from captured footage. 

Research and analysis company GlobalData’s Thematic Intelligence report: autonomous vehicles, forecast that sensors and cameras will see the fastest innovation and funding within the AV market. This is to help create a safer AV market and improvements to camera quality are likely to happen as soon as 2025. 

LG Innotek and AOE Optronics are hoping to improve quality as well as stay competitive on the price of cameras. 

“LG Innotek will rapidly expand the camera module portfolio to vehicles, XR devices and other areas,” stated LG Innotek’s CEO Moon Hyuk-soo.

By 2036, GlobalData expects at least 85 million light vehicles manufactured to have some low levels of autonomy, which is around 76% of cars available on the market.