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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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Is Your Brain Big Enough?

Do you ever feel like you could use a bigger brain? One of my all-time favorite Dilbert cartoons is the 1994 strip depicting a consultant so smart he had to "wrap his brain around his torso." In contrast, I often feel as if my brain could benefit from an external accelerator. As an engineer, I've often wondered when humans will be able to boost our brainpower with electronic devices. One could argue that we already do augment our brains via electronics. Through smartphones, an amazing amount of Read more...

Case Study: Independent Evaluation Enables a Development Kit to Hit a Home Run

BDTI is well known for its software-related capabilities: performance- and power consumption-related benchmarking, for example, along with algorithm evaluation and development and optimization work. In such projects, BDTI frequently employs semiconductor manufacturers' evaluation boards and associated software toolsets, which are often combined to create development kits. And as noted several months ago, BDTI is no stranger to hardware development, either, partnering with chip suppliers to co- 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—Quietly, Our Cars Are Learning to Drive Themselves

Lately there's been a great deal of buzz about self-driving cars. The idea of autonomous vehicles evokes excitement in some people and terror in others. Clearly, there are significant challenges to be overcome before self-driving cars can become mainstream. To me, the most exciting aspect of self-driving cars is that many of the same technologies required for future self-driving cars are making human-driven cars safer today. Take Mobileye, for example. The Israeli company has been a pioneer in Read more...

Case Study: Quantifying the Incremental Battery Draw of Advanced Audio Processing

Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life. Similarly, Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever. System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors. Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition, and to prove their processors' capabilities to customers. But what exactly comprises a good benchmark? One obvious 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...