Computer vision researchers build an AI benchmark app for Android phones

A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They've created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks. They're hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also to chipmakers (by helping them get competitive insights); Android developers (to see how fast their AI models will run on different devices); and, well, to phone nerds -- such as by showing whether or not a particular device contains the necessary drivers for AI accelerators. The app, called AI Benchmark, is available for download on Google Play and can run on any device with Android 4.1 or higher -- generating a score the researchers describe as a "final verdict" of the device's AI performance. AI tasks being assessed by their benchmark system include image classification, face recognition, image deblurring, image super-resolution, photo enhancement or segmentation.