Researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have developed an ultra-fast image sensor with a built-in neural network; the sensor can be trained to recognize certain objects. They describe their work on ultrafast machine vision in a paper in Nature. Machine vision technology has taken huge leaps in recent years, and is now becoming an integral part of various intelligent systems, including autonomous vehicles and robotics. Usually, visual information is captured by a frame-based camera, converted into a digital format and processed afterwards using a machine-learning algorithm such as an artificial neural network (ANN). The large amount of (mostly redundant) data passed through the entire signal chain, however, results in low frame rates and high power consumption.