Video

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Consumer Electronics Begin to See

Longtime readers of this column will know that I've been predicting the proliferation of visual intelligence in a wide range of products – including consumer electronics – for a few years now. Over that time, there have been a few high-profile successes of vision in consumer electronics. For example, the first-generation Microsoft Kinect, while not a hit with serious gamers, sold tens of million units and enabled many casual users to enjoy console gaming for the first time. There have also been Read more...

New Chips Expand Automotive Safety Capabilities

Smartphones and tablets may hog the limelight, but advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) represent another hot technology sector. Market analysis firm Strategy Analytics, for example, expects that by 2021, automotive OEMs will be spending in excess of $25 billion per year on a diversity of assistance and safety solutions (Figure 1). Embedded vision is a critical element of ADAS designs, some of which use vision alone, while others combine vision with radar, LiDAR, infrared, ultrasound, or Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—"We're Number One!"

My colleagues and I at BDTI recently completed a project to help a chip company select a licensable processor core to perform computer vision functions in a new SoC design. In the process, we learned many things about these processors. But, more interesting to me, we also learned something about human nature. A typical general-purpose embedded processor chip is used by hundreds or thousands of customers, so suppliers find it necessary to make detailed information about these chips readily Read more...

Case Study: BDTI's Expert, Independent Analysis Enables Optimum Vision Processor Selection

A growing number of products are incorporating computer vision capabilities. This, in turn, has led to rapid growth in the number of processors being offered for vision applications.  Selecting the best processor (whether a chip for use in a system design, or an IP core for use in an SoC) is challenging, for several reasons. First, these processors use very diverse architecture approaches, which makes it tough to compare them. Second, because vision applications and algorithms are also quite Read more...

ARM Cortex-M7: Digital Signal Processing Drives Family Evolution

ARM's Cortex-A series of high-performance CPU cores garner significant attention by virtue of their use in high-volume, high-visibility smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics devices. But company's Cortex-M and Cortex-R processor families, which target embedded applications, are even more widely used. The latest Cortex-M family member, the just-announced Cortex-M7, further boosts performance especially in floating-point and other digital signal processing applications, blurring Read more...

The Movidius Myriad 2: An Embedded Vision Processor Through and Through

Substantial industry investment in a particular application, both in terms of silicon devices and the software running on and interacting with them, is often a barometer of that application's transition toward mainstream adoption. This has definitely been the case recently for the practical implementation of computer vision technology, which for decades was limited to academic research and niche commercial uses. Now, however, the steadily improving performance, power consumption and cost- Read more...

Sensory: Voice and Face Recognition Blended Intelligently

Sensory has built its business and made its name over the past 20 years in voice detection and speech recognition, as InsideDSP's April 2013 coverage of the company's TrulyHandsFree always-on voice activation algorithm showcased. However, as Gordon Haupt, the company's director of vision technology, noted during a recent briefing, the name "Sensory" isn't speech-specific, indicative of the company’s long-term aspiration to expand beyond microphones into algorithms fed by other types of input Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—What’s the Best Processor for Embedded Vision?

These days, more and more product creators are incorporating computer vision into their designs. At the recent Embedded Vision Summit conference, a majority of the roughly 500 attendees reported that they are currently working on a vision-enabled product, or plan to start a vision-based design within the next year. And, increasingly, these designs target high-volume markets, like the recently announced Amazon Fire smartphone and the collision-prevention systems now being offered in many mid- Read more...

Lithography, Architecture Evolutions Boost Analog Devices' Mid-Range Blackfin Devices

The April 2012 edition of InsideDSP covered Analog Devices' BF60x family, which as the then-published product roadmap indicated, was the successor to the high end of the BF5xx product range (Figure 1). Figure 1. Analog Devices' new BF70x products fill the "single core Blackfin" next-generation slot on the company's published roadmap two years ago. All four BF60x family members run at clock speeds of up to 500 MHz and integrate a dual Blackfin DSP cores; the BF608 and BF609 additionally embed a Read more...

Case Study: Diverse Assistance Leads To Vision Processing Optimization Success

As computer vision is deployed into a variety of new applications, driven by the emergence of powerful, low-cost, and energy-efficient processors, companies need to find ways to squeeze demanding vision processing algorithms into size-, weight-, power, and cost-constrained systems. Fortunately, BDTI's foundation as a benchmarking services company has, as has been mentioned before, provided its engineers with extensive skills in optimizing software to best exploit processor capabilities. And it' Read more...