Prophesee today announced the release of OpenEB, a set of key open-source software modules and a set of new Event-Based Machine Learning solutions. The new products are aimed at optimizing ML training and inference for event-based applications, including optical flow and object detection. In addition, the company is offering the industry’s largest HD Event-Based dataset to developers as a free download.
This latest release of the company’s Metavision® Intelligence Suite includes an expanded set of development tools and software for designing industrial vision systems that leverage the performance and efficiency of Event-Based Vision. The suite now includes close to 100 algorithms, 67 code samples and 11 use-case specific application modules that accelerate the development process.
The open-source modules of OpenEB are available through Github and allow designers to build custom plugins and ensure compatibility with the Metavision Intelligence Suite for developing event-based systems. It also provides a platform for developers to share software components across what they call the “machine vision ecosystem”.
“We want to set an open technology standard in the machine vision ecosystem that enables new levels of accessibility and interoperability”, said Luca Verre, CEO and co-founder of Prophesee. “As the leader and technology pioneer in event-based vision systems, our role is to help proliferate its use and make critical development aids, data and tools more readily available to product developers.
“Our approach provides the growing ecosystem around event-based technology with a rich, open foundation and a strong development framework. This includes extensive and reliable data that we have collected over several years, as well as application modules that leverage our expertise in a variety of specific uses to accelerate the development of customer-specific systems”.
The Metavision Intelligence Suite adds new applications for processes that can be enhanced with Event-Based Vision. These include applications like “Particle Size Monitoring”, which counts and measures objects passing through a field of view at high speeds (up to 500,00 pixels/second) with up to 99.9% counting precision in a production line. There’s also “Jet Monitoring”, which monitors the speed and quality of liquid dispensing in real-time up to 500Hz and generates an alarm automatically when errors occur on the dispenser. Finally, there’s “Edgelet tracking”, which can achieve real-time tracking of 3D objects with low compute power by leveraging the low data-rate and sparse information provided by event-based sensors.
Beginning with access to the real-sequence data set Prophesee has created over the past four years, developers can use a variety of tools to guide the development of neural network models, run inference on event-based data for both supervised training tasks for object detection and self-supervised training for optical flow – all optimized for event-based vision. In addition, developers can create their own models or leverage their existing frame-based datasets and models, using the provided event-based simulator, and improve them with Event-Based Vision.
OpenEB offers a standard Event-Based data format for camera makers and their customers, whilst the open-source model for the Metavision Intelligence Suite enables compatibility across the ecosystem of camera makers and their customers. The company says the release of a number of key modules under Open Source License will accelerate the creation of custom plugins whilst ensuring compatibility with the underlying hardware from camera manufacturers.
Prophesee is based in Paris, with local offices in Grenoble, Shanghai, Tokyo and Silicon Valley. The company is driven by a team of more than 100 engineers, holds more than 50 international patents and is backed by leading international investors including Sony, iBionext, 360 Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Supernova Invest, and European Investment Bank.
You can find more information about Prophesee on its website.
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