A.I. camera could help self-driving cars 'see' better - Futurity

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Researchers have devised a new type of artificially intelligent camera system that can classify images faster and more energy-efficiently. The image recognition technology that underlies today's autonomous cars and aerial drones depends on artificial intelligence: the computers essentially teach themselves to recognize objects like a dog, a pedestrian crossing the street, or a stopped car. The new camera could one day be small enough to fit in future electronic devices, something that is not possible today because of the size and slow speed of computers that can run artificial intelligence algorithms. "That autonomous car you just passed has a relatively huge, relatively slow, energy intensive computer in its trunk," says Gordon Wetzstein, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University who led the research. Future applications will need something much faster and smaller to process the stream of images, he says.