Israeli computer vision startup, Trigo Vision, has won $7 million in a seed funding round by UK-Israel based Hetz Ventures and Vertex Ventures Israel. Trigo Vision's vision platform is designed for the retail market. It combines a network of ceiling-based cameras with machine vision algorithms to identify customers' shopping items, similar in principle to the Amazon Go store in Seattle, which doesn't have a checkout because it can track what customers put in their shopping basket. The funding will be used to grow the company's core R&D team and build new applications for its technology. 'The founding team has managed to assemble a world-class R&D team to tackle an enormous user experience problem in retail,' commented Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures.

This smart doll demonstrates a new cheap, privacy-oriented computer vision platform in action. OK, let's get this out the way up top: A robot doll that can sense your child's emotions and change how it behaves accordingly sounds like the kind of high-concept horror movie a Hollywood screenwriter would pitch after binge-watching Westworld and a Chucky marathon. In reality, it describes research being carried out by investigators at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Ciudad Real, Spain. What they've built as a proof of concept is an artificially intelligent doll that can recognize eight different emotions and runs on an AI chip costing just 115 euros (around $130). Emotion recognition is carried out through facial-recognition technology, via a camera hidden in the doll's mouth.