After 35 years of work for the Defense Department, Jacques Beaulieu decided it was time to form his own company. Beaulieu Consulting Incorporated (BCI), specializing in technological innovations, began auspiciously enough. But the business ran into serious problems on its very first project.
Beaulieu had developed a hearing implant for his client, Cosem Neurostim. The device was designed to restore some hearing to deaf patients by electrically stimulating the nerves. “But after a successful development on a patient, the company was sued by Dunlop alleging that they owned the rights for this technology,” Beaulieu said. “I had all the proofs that we had the proprietary rights on the technology predating Dunlop’s claim, but it would cost millions to fight this in court and Cosem could not afford it. They went bankrupt.”
But Beaulieu and his son, like most entrepreneurs, don't give up easily. BCI overcame the setback by taking advantage of an old connection; they contracted with the Defense Department. Their next brilliant technological idea met with resounding success. Beaulieu recalls, “I was coming back from a field trial in 1999, and a new method for processing video images to detect small objects came to my mind. This was later called Small Objects Image Filter, or SOIF. The technique proved to be very useful for rapidly detecting objects of interest in satellite images as well as sonar data, and eventually to identify objects of a specified color.”
And that wasn’t all. Beaulieu's time with the Defense Research Establishment Valcartier (DREV) was immensely productive, resulting in a number of patents. He started out working on radar-related issues, but switched fields upon the groundbreaking discovery of the laser. “I felt that this had tremendous import in the future of remote sensing. But I needed to learn more about the physics of the interaction between solids and light, which is now called photonics,” he said. This required further education, all under a time crunch. “I managed to complete my thesis in 1969 in my spare time. This was not easy because when I returned to DREV, I was named the head of the Electro-Optics section.”
In 1985, after producing numerous laser-related technologies for DREV, Beaulieu helped build the National Optics Institute. “As a co-founder of the institute, I was named a member of their Intellectual Property Committee until 2010, when I resigned because of my health degradation,” he said. But demand for his talents has not waned; he was asked to participate in a NATO research program that is still classified today.
Meanwhile, the innovations keep coming. BCI's recent inventions include a system of microprocessor codes that can process video images in real time instead of relying on tapes, the development of an intrusion alarm system for use in the battlefield, a passive stereoscopic technique to determine the range of various objects without detection, and new industrial applications such as an automatic collision avoidance system for vehicles.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
