There have always been distractions for drivers on the road, and with new technology comes further distractions such as texting or FaceTiming being the most prevalent danger facing drivers young and old. So the minds at Ambarella and Smart Eye have teamed up to develop a technology that can sense what is happening within the cabin of a car.
Picture this: You and a passenger are driving home after a late night. Your passenger falls asleep as you amble down a dark road and slowly your own eyes begin to feel heavy. Not a good picture, especially if you want to make it home. Smart Eye applied the use of Ambarella’s new CV22AQ CVflow computer vision processor within its in-cabin monitoring systems. Amberella is known for its camera sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) chips put into driver-assistance cameras, electronic mirrors, in-car cameras, and parking assistance technology.
Through this collaboration, the cameras within the vehicle will be able to track head, mouth, and eye positions to monitor the driver’s alertness. The chip from Ambarella and Smart Eye’s Drive Monitoring System work in tandem to track the driver’s actions and intentions as the car is in motion. The chip delivers high-performance AI at just 2.5 watts of power consumption.
“We are very pleased to be working with Ambarella to enable advanced AI in the next generation of compact driver and in‐cabin monitoring camera designs,” says Martin Krantz, CEO of Smart Eye. “The pairing of Ambarella’s CVflow high‐performance, low power-consumption computer vision processing with Smart Eye’s growing array of high‐accuracy and AI‐based driver monitoring algorithms offers a highly effective, scalable solution for Smart Eye’s OEM and tier‐1 customers. With the Ambarella CV22AQ, Smart Eye is able to provide high‐resolution, high‐precision head pose, gaze, eyelid, and mouth tracking in 60 Hz, paired with concurrent execution of our growing portfolio of AI‐based interior sensing algorithms.”
Amberella’s innovative CV22AQ chip delivers support to global shutter and rolling shutter CMOS sensors, which are required for in-cabin applications. Then the processor’s image signal pipeline (ISP) provides support for RGB-IR color filter arrays, enabling the detection and monitoring for low-light cabins. The high dynamic range (HDR) processing discerns image detail in high contrast sensors, amplifying computer vision capabilities of both the chip and performance potential of Smart Eye algorithms.
