July 2, 2012 -- What up-and-coming innovation can help you design a system that alerts users to a child struggling in a swimming pool, or to an intruder attempting to enter a residence or business? It's the same technology that can warn drivers of impending hazards on the roadway, and even prevent them from executing lane-change, acceleration and other maneuvers that would be hazardous to themselves and others. It can assist a human physician in diagnosing a patient's illness. It can uniquely identify a face, subsequently initiating a variety of actions, interpreting gestures and even discerning a person's emotional state. And in conjunction with GPS, compass, accelerometer, gyroscope and other features, it can deliver a data-augmented presentation of a scene.

The technology common to all of these application examples is embedded vision, which is poised to enable the next generation of electronic-system success stories. Embedded vision got its start in traditional computer vision applications such as assembly line inspection, optical character recognition, robotics, surveillance and military systems. In recent years, however, the decreasing costs and increasing capabilities of key technology building blocks have broadened and accelerated vision's penetration into key high-volume markets.

By Brian Dipert, Embedded Vision Alliance, Jose Alvarez, Xilinx, and Mihran Touriguian, Berkeley Design Technology, Inc.