Sony has unveiled two new photo sensors that have the particularity of performing artificial intelligence tasks themselves.
Until now, these tasks, such as recognizing faces or tracking an object, were performed either by the device processor, by a dedicated chip, or by the cloud, i.e. servers receiving the data and interpreting them.
By sticking a dedicated AI chip to the back of its photo sensors, Sony allows these tasks to be performed locally, with a very small footprint. The Japanese manufacturer supplies more than half of the image sensors of smartphones worldwide, including those of the iPhone, which augurs well for market progress in this area.
However, the first sensors doped with AI, the IMX500 and IMX501, which have 12 megapixels, are not intended for smartphones. Sony first targets manufacturers and large retailers, who could take advantage of this to analyze customer actions (as in shops Amazon Go) or automatically calculate stocks.
In addition, the capabilities of these sensors are currently limited: Mark Hanson, Sony’s director of innovation, told The Verge that they only worked with enough algorithms “Basic”.
In the iPhone, the Neural Engine of Ax chips, capable of carrying out more than 1,000 billion machine learning operations per second in its latest version, probably has a bright future ahead of it.
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