Making Machines See: Intel Agrees to Acquire Movidius

Technology giant Intel has agreed to acquire Movidius, an Irish company that specializes in machine vision technology.

The deal, announced on September 5, will bring Movidius’ low power vision processing to IoT devices and autonomous machines powered by Intel’s CPU chips and processors. The technology will become a part of Intel’s RealSense technology, which contains a 1080p HD camera, an infrared camera, and an infrared laser projector to “see” like the human eye, sensing depth and motion.

“This acquisition brings algorithms tuned for deep learning, depth processing, navigation and mapping, and natural interactions, as well as broad expertise in embedded computer vision and machine intelligence. The ability to track, navigate, map and recognize both scenes and objects using Movidius’ low-power and high-performance SoCs opens opportunities in areas where heat, battery life and form factors are key,” said Josh Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Technology Group in a blog post.

Movidius is currently working on AI involving the combining of dedicated low-power hardware with advanced algorithms. In a post on their website, the company said combining their VPU (Visual Processing Unit) platform with Intel’s RealSense depth-sensing technology will give autonomous machines the ability to see in 3D, understand what they’re seeing, and navigate based on that data. Together the companies will work to bring this technology to IoT devices like drones, security cameras and more.

Related:

Special report: Frontiers in artificial intelligence for the IoT

More on this topic: edge computing