The Internet of Things needs Eyes of Things

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), as essential parts of the Internet of Things, need universal sensors to analyze their environment and to serve their genuine purpose e.g., monitoring and controlling the physical world for our benefit. One of the richest and most flexible sensor modalities is Vision. Therefore, the EU-funded research project “Eyes of Things” (EoT) started the development of advanced concepts, which allow for the integration of Machine Vision capabilities into modern CPSs. Big industrial partners contribute already, among them Thales, Awaiba, Movidius, nViso and Evercam. While the research is ongoing, the Eyes-of-Things-project triggers the broad discussion within the Imaging industry about applications, technical opportunities and commercial requirements of Vision-enabled Cyber-physical Systems.

For this purpose, EoT recently brought together 43 experts from 31 different organizations for a thematic session on Embedded Computer Vision in Oslo, Norway, May 5th 2015. During the session, four invited speakers, among them Max Larin (Ximea) and Peter Corcoran (FotoNation), gave thought-provoking presentations on applications and technologies of embedded vision systems: Besides the demand for high image processing performance, future Vision-enabled CPSs shall be compact and inexpensive. Perhaps most importantly, they need to operate at very low power consumption.

From combined low-power high-performance computation to unified camera interfaces and highly efficient image processing algorithms – the research in Eyes of Things will investigate the broad complexity of embedded vision solutions for the evolving Internet of Things. On its website http://www.eyesofthings.eu/ as well as on LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr, Eyes of Things continuously informs about its progress as well as upcoming events to initiate a lively exchange among technology experts, OEMs and end-customers about the eyes of the Internet of Things.