‘Seeing’ on tiny battery-powered microcontrollers with RNNPool
Computer vision has rapidly evolved over the past decade, allowing for such applications as Seeing AI, a camera app that describes aloud a person’s surroundings, helping those who are blind or have low vision; systems that can detect whether a product, such as a computer chip or article of clothing, has been assembled correctly, improving quality control; and services that can convert information from hard-copy documents into a digital format, making it easier to manage personal and business data. All this has been made possible by the evolution of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and faster hardware that can run increasingly deeper architectures. And thanks to specialized neural accelerators for CNNs, computer vision applications that were limited to the realm of