Sony has announced the world’s first image sensor with integrated AI smarts. The new IMX500 sensor incorporates both processing power and memory, allowing it to perform machine learning-powered computer vision tasks without extra hardware. The result, says Sony, will be faster, cheaper, and more secure AI cameras.
Over the past few years, devices ranging from smartphones to surveillance cameras have benefited from the integration of AI. Machine learning can be used to not only improve the quality of the pictures we take, but also understand video like a human would; identifying people and objects in frame. The applications of this technology are huge (and sometimes worrying), enabling everything from self-driving cars to automated surveillance.
But many applications rely on sending images and videos to the cloud to be analyzed. This can be a slow and insecure journey, exposing data to hackers. In other scenarios, manufacturers have to install specialized processing cores on devices to handle the extra computational demand, as with new high-end phones from Apple, Google, and Huawei.
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From left to right: the IMX500 as a bare chip and IMX501 as a package product.Sony Electronics Inc.But Sony says its new image sensor offers a more streamlined solution than either of these approaches.
“There are some other ways to implement these solutions,” Sony vice president of business and innovation Mark Hanson told The Verge, referencing edge computing, which use dedicated AI chips not attached directly to the image sensor. “But I do not believe they will be anywhere close to as cost effective as us shipping image sensors in the billions.”
The IMX500 is destined for commercial clients, not consumer hardware
Sony’s huge presence in the image processing market will certainly push this technology to clients at a huge scale. Hanson notes that the company has more than 60 percent market share, and shipped about 1.6 billion sensors last year. Among Sony’s customers is Apple, which uses the company’s sensors in its iPhone line.
This first-generation AI image sensor, though, is unlikely to end up in consumer devices like smartphones and tablets, at least to begin with. Instead, Sony will be targeting retailers and industrial clients, which are beginning to use computer vision technology more widely.
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