Researchers have demonstrated a new intelligent photonic sensing-computing chip that can process, transmit and reconstruct images of a scene within nanoseconds. This advance opens the door to extremely high-speed image processing that could benefit edge intelligence for machine vision applications such as autonomous driving, industrial inspection and robotic vision.
Edge computing, which performs intensive computing tasks like image processing and analysis on local devices, is evolving into edge intelligence by adding artificial intelligence (AI) driven analysis and decision-making.
“Capturing, processing and analyzing images for edge-based tasks such as autonomous driving is currently limited to millisecond-level speeds due to the necessity of optical-to-electronic conversions,” said research team leader Lu Fang from Tsinghua University in China. “Our new chip can perform all these processes in just nanoseconds by keeping them all in the optical domain. This could be used to significantly enhance, or even replace, the traditional architecture of sensor acquisition followed by AI post-processing.”
Leave a reply