ADEC Technologies AG

ADEC Technologies AG was founded in 2009 in Zug, Switzerland. The company took offices in the Canton of Sankt Gallen near the upper end of lake of Zurich. It is specialized in the development and production of detection devices, designed and manufactured in Switzerland. The first range of products that was introduced to the market was a line of non-intrusive, above-ground road traffic detectors. The first models of the TDC3 product family hit the market later that same year. The TDC3 models utilize three detection technologies to achieve greater overall performance at a significantly lower price: Instead of using major computing power to endlessly optimize the signals of a single detection technology to achieve usable performance and accuracy, the TDC3 traffic detectors use three distinct detection technologies with rather modest computing to deliver traffic data quality second to none in its price category.

One of the co-founders of ADEC Technologies was first introduced to time-of-flight sensor technology in 2006 at a traffic-related exhibition in San Francisco, California. In 2009, prior to joining ADEC Technologies, he began to explore applications for the time-of-flight technology. The first thought were high-end people counting stations, somewhat similar to optical turnstiles but without the gate. After joining ADEC Technologies, he took the preliminary research to the University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland in Rapperswil where it soon became evident that TOF sensors provided the highest accuracy though the costs were prohibitively high still for mainstream applications. In the following years, new technologies and novel methods dramatically lowered the costs for 3D sensors; the advent of the Kinect depth sensor changed the landscape of 3D imaging altogether.

The lower price tag of depth sensors however brought new problems. A new, automated way needed to be found that would let users align depth sensors in relation to each other so that it became possible to quickly build a larger, coherent detection zone from smaller, individual sensors’ detection zones. It was simply not feasible to manually bring into position (any) two sensors’ locations well enough to ensure smooth hand-over of tracks. Another problem that needed to be addressed was the amount of traffic on the network, between the sensors, that became very large. So the concept of areas of interest was introduced to minimize the zones within a sensor’s field-of-view that required notification of incoming tracks into neighbors’ detection zone. This effort led to a patent (currently pending) that describes the findings of this research.

During the same period, ARM-based single-board computers also became much more powerful while their costs continued to decline, to the point the technology became affordable for products in mainstream applications. ADEC's line of anonymous people tracking and counting devices aims at satisfying the market needs for anonymous yet accurate people counters and trackers at affordable prices. The Observer One was introduced in July of 2013, the Observer II in January 2014. The Observer II currently supports the Xtion from ASUS (PrimeSense) and the Swiss-Ranger TOF sensors SR 4000 and SR 4500 from Mesa Imaging.

ADEC Technologies is privately owned and owner-managed. It employs five highly-motivated workers and additionally relies on external staff primarily for basic research and some development. Annual turn-over is in the low seven-figures K€.

ADEC Technologies AG
Gublenstrasse 1
8733 Eschenbach
Switzerland

Phone +41 (0) 55 214 2400
Fax   +41 (0) 55 214 2402
Web: www.adec-technologies.com