www.newelectronics.co.uk, May. 26, 2021 –
CEA-Leti has unveiled what is said to be the world's first autonomous imager technology that activates smartphones and small appliances through face recognition or other specific patterns.
Called µWAI (micro-WAY) and sized as small as a pound coin, the autonomous imager features an innovative readout and processing architecture co-designed with an optimised algorithmic pipeline, in which the recognition results from a sequence of elementary algorithms, to provide ultralow-power wake-up modes and compact silicon implementation to keep costs down.
According to CEA-Leti it is the first smart image sensor jointly featuring auto-exposure for all lighting conditions and 88dB dynamic range, as well as motion detection and feature extraction for event-based functioning, and AI-based object recognition that triggers highly reliable identification. These key features also enable highly reliable decision taking for a few tens of pJ/pixel/frame, which outperforms existing off-the-shelf systems. The pJ/pixel/frame measures the energy spent by each pixel for each single image within a frame of images. A typical implementation requires about 10,000 times more energy than µWAI.