Oculi offers soft platforms around SPU sensors

Oculi Inc. (Rochester, New York ) a fabless chip company seeking to add intelligence to image sensors at the pixel level, is offering access to two platforms – Magenta and Burgundy.

Oculi was founded in 2019 and the early-access evaluation platform enables a limited number of developers to design with the sensor and processing unit (SPU), which Oculi calls the world’s first software-defined vision sensor.

The sensors are of low resolution compared with leading-edge image sensors but pixels can be software-programmed to output data relevant to specific AI functions. This can optimize performance, bandwidth and power consumption while providing privacy protection by not providing human-discernible images. Full-frame images can also be captured.

The SPU S12 is manufactured for Oculi by GlobalFoundries in its 55LPx manufacturing process.

The Magenta platform is optimized for data output flexibility for general-purpose visual AI applications and is suitable for software development and prototyping.

The Burgundy platform focuses on presence and occupancy detection and thus is suitable for efficiency in monitoring applications.

Typical applications for such a smart-pixel sensor include:

• Occupancy management
• Retail analytics
• Home security and automation
• Gesture recognition
• Industrial automation