Sony has revealed the first combination AI chip and an image sensor that will make its cameras smarter. According to a report from The Verge, it was announced that Sony has developed the world's first image sensor with integrated AI smarts.
The new IMX500 sensor will have both memory and processing power that will allow its camera to have machine learning-powered computer vision task performance without any extra hardware.
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Sony said that the results of the innovation will produce cheaper, faster, and more secure AI cameras. Artificial Intelligence has used in many devices ranging from surveillance cameras to smartphones in the last few years.
Improving the quality of photos, however, is not the only goal of machine learning. It also focuses on understanding video as a human would, such as identifying objects and people in the frame. Machine learning technology is responsible for the development of automated surveillance and self-driving cars.
However, the application of the technology greatly relies on sending videos and images to the cloud which is then analyzed. The process can be slow and not secure since it could expose data to hackers and cyberattacks. To avoid these scenarios, specialized processing cores must be installed by the manufacturers on devices, such as in high-end phones from Apple, Huawei, and Google, to handle the extra computational demand.
Sony will have AI chips and image sensor for the first time to improve its camera resolution and provide smarter service
According to The Verge, Sony's new image sensor will provide a more streamlined solution compared to other technology approaches. Mark Hanson, Sony's vice president of business innovation, clarified that there are some other ways to implement such solutions. He was speaking about the edge computing technology which uses dedicated AI chips that are not attached directly to the image sensor.
The first-generation AI image sensor might not be integrated into consumer devices such as tablets and smartphones. Hanson said that the technology will be potentially applied in Amazon's cashier-less Go stores.
Sony will be targeting retailers and industrial clients. The AI-enabled cameras in Amazon's Go stores are used by the retailers to track shoppers, charging them for the items they grab from the shelves which are captured by the cameras.
An AI image sensor not only leads to cost savings, but it could also provide privacy benefits. Object detection can be done on-device if the chip is directly inputted on the back of the image sensor.
The image sensor itself will provide essential AI analysis and simply produce metadata instead of sending off data to the cloud or a nearby processor for analysis. IMX500's ability to apply a standard image recognition algorithm (MobileNet V1) to a single video frame in just 3.1 milliseconds makes it faster than many other AI cameras.
