Wow; we've been waiting how long now?
b
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in lake'ch, my kin... 4 Ix
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psst! visit the LUGE homepage at http://eugene-linux.cyber-dyne.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 16:49:36 +0000
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: tech: >H Vision chips
From: Samael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Transhuman Mailing List
From: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000309S0002
A French technology research company has unwrapped a vision-processing
system-on-a-chip that it said can be manufactured as inexpensively as
a microcontroller.
The $6 Generic Visual Perception Processor (GVPP) can automatically
detect objects and track their movement in real-time, according to
Bureau d'Etudes Vision (BEV).
The rights to manufacture the GVPP will be up for grabs at a
technology auction slated for next month. If properly commercialized,
auctioneers PricewaterhouseCoopers estimate a multibillion dollar
gross revenue stream for the GVPP based on 100 proposed applications
in 10 industries.
"We couldn't manage multiple licenses to competing companies," said
Nabeel Al-Adsani, director of operations at BEV. "Instead, we hope to
interest major semiconductor manufacturers in licensing the GVPP so
that they can supply the application-specific companies with chips."
The GVPP, which crunches 20 billion instructions per second (Bips),
models the human perceptual process at the hardware level by mimicking
the separate temporal and spatial functions of the eye-to-brain
system. The processor sees its environment as a stream of histograms
regarding the location and velocity of objects. Those objects could be
the white lines on a highway, the football in a televised game or the
annotated movement of enemy ground forces from satellite telemetry.
Alongside a CMOS imager on its 2-by-4-inch evaluation board, the GVPP
has been demonstrated as capable of learning-in-place to solve a
variety of pattern recognition problems. It has automatic
normalization for varying object size, orientation, and lighting
conditions, and can function in daylight or darkness, BEV said.
A complete GVPP system, including the charge-coupled device and all
support circuity, should cost less than $50, the company said. BEV
also said the software it provides with the chips permits engineers to
develop applications for the GVPP in just a few weeks.
The GVPP was invented in 1992, when BEV founder Patric Pirim saw it
would be relatively simple for a CMOS chip to implement in hardware
the separate contributions of temporal and spatial processing in the
brain. The brain-eye system uses layers of parallel-processing neurons
that pass the signal through a series of preprocessing steps,
resulting in real-time tracking of multiple moving objects within a
visual scene.
Pirim created a chip architecture that mimicked the work of the
neurons, with the help of multiplexing and memory. The result is an
inexpensive device that can autonomously "perceive" and then track up
to eight user-specified objects in a video stream based on hue,
luminance, saturation, spatial orientation, speed, and direction of
motion, the company said.
The GVPP's major performance strength over current $10,000 vision
systems is its automatic adaptation to varying lighting conditions.
Today's vision systems dictate uniform, shadowless illumination, and
even next-generation prototype systems, designed to work under
"normal" lighting conditions, can be used only from dawn to dusk. The
GVPP, on the other hand, adapts to real-time changes in lighting
without recalibration, day or night.
Since processing in each module on the GVPP runs in parallel out of
its own memory space, multiple GVPP chips can be cascaded to expand
the number of objects that can be recognized and tracked. When set in
master-slave mode, any number of GVPP chips can divide and conquer,
for instance, complex stereoscopic vision applications.
BEV lists possible applications for the GVPP in process monitoring,
quality control, and assembly; automotive systems such as intelligent
air bags that monitor passenger size and traffic congestion monitors;
pedestrian detection, license plate recognition, electronic toll
collection, automatic parking management, and automatic inspection;
and medical uses, including disease identification. The chip could
also prove useful in unmanned aircraft, miniature smart weapons,
ground reconnaissance and other military applications, as well as in
security access using facial, iris, fingerprint, or height and gait
identification
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