Vision AI starter kit adds event-based sensor

Prophesee SA has announced that its event-based Metavision HD sensor and AI are now available for use with the AMD Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit for advanced edge machine-vision applications. It is the industry’s first event-based vision development kit compatible with an AMD platform, the company said.

The Prophesee-enabled AMD Kria KV260 Starter Kit provides a platform for evaluation and production of industrial-grade solutions for applications such as smart city, machine vision, security cameras and retail analytics. Prophesee will showcase the new starter kit at Automate 2024, Chicago, May 6-9.

Prophesee Metavision starter kit, including the AMD Kria KV260 and active marker LED board. Click for a larger image. (Source: Prophesee SA)

In collaboration with AMD, the FPGA-based KV260 Vision AI starter kit is a development platform for the AMD Kria K26 system-on-module (SOM). It is designed for advanced vision application development without requiring complex hardware design knowledge or FPGA programming skills, Prophesee said. The production-ready AMD Kria SOMs for edge-AI applications provide an energy-efficient FPGA-based device for vision and robotics applications.

When combined with the Prophesee event-based vision technology, machine-vision-system developers can leverage the lower latency and lower power capabilities of the Metavision platform. Developers can use the platform to “evaluate and create more efficient, and in many cases not previously possible, applications compared to traditional frame-based vision sensing approaches,” Prophesee said.

A plug-and-play active markers tracking application is included in this kit. It allows for >1,000-Hz 3D pose estimation, with complete background rejection at the pixel level. This application highlights unique features of the event-based Metavision technologies, Prophesee said, enabling a new range of ultra high-speed tracking use cases such as game controller tracking, construction site safety and heavy-load anti-sway systems.

Additional ready-to-use application algorithms will be available over the coming months, the company said.

The Prophesee Starter Kit provides an out-of-the-box development solution to get up and running with the Prophesee Metavision SDK and IMX636 HD event-based sensor, developed in collaboration with Sony, allowing easy porting of algorithms to the AMD commercial and industrial-grade SOMs powered by the custom-built Zynq UltraScale multiprocessing SoC.

The Prophesee-enabled AMD Kria KV260 Starter Kit is available now. It will be on display at Automate 2024 in Prophesee’s booth 3452.