What Is Embedded Vision & What Can I Do With It?

"What the heck is embedded vision?" you may be asking when you see the title of our next Continuing Education Center course, Fundamentals of Embedded Computer Vision: Creating Machines That See. That's a good question, and Jeff Bier is the one to answer it. As someone who's reported on machine vision and has interviewed Jeff before, I'm especially looking forward to this course.

Until recently, because of its cost, embedded computer vision was found mostly in low-volume applications like machine vision. There, it usually consists of visible light and maybe also infrared cameras, plus various types of inspection systems, attached to robots or not, on the manufacturing floor, the assembly line, or the warehouse.

But then one of those magic moments happened in electronics. CMOS image sensors got cheaper, smaller, and much more powerful, and cameras started appearing everywhere -- for example, in tablet PCs, the iPhone, and driver safety systems. Those high-volume apps drove prices down even further. Meanwhile, embedded processors with enough performance to deal with vision applications reached price and power consumption levels low enough for consumer apps.

So last year Jeff, an expert on embedded processors and a prescient guy who's good at reading the electronics industry tea leaves, founded the Embedded Vision Alliance. The EVA is an industry partnership that works to inspire and empower designers to create more capable and responsive products by integrating vision capabilities into them.

During the week-long course, he will use case studies and demonstrations to illustrate what embedded vision is all about and why you should consider including it in your design. Jeff has divided the course into an introduction, a day on image sensors, another on processors, and one on vision algorithms and tools. The last day looks at even more complex algorithms, like face detection and object tracking. It also shows how to set up your own vision algorithm development environment using OpenCV, the free, open-source vision software library.

Click here to sign up now!

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