Prophesee SA, inventor of the world’s most advanced neuromorphic vision systems, announced that its Event-based Metavision HD sensor and AI are now available for use with the AMD Kria ™ KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, creating a powerful and efficient combination to accelerate the development of advanced Edge machine vision applications. It marks the industry’s first Event-based Vision development kit compatible with an AMD platform, providing customers a platform to both evaluate and go to production with an industrial-grade solution for target applications such as smart city and machine vision, security cameras, retail analytics, and many others.

The development platform for the AMD Kria™ K26 System-on-Module (SOM), the KV260 Vision AI starter kit is built for advanced vision application development without requiring complex hardware design knowledge or FPGA programming skills. AMD Kria SOMs for edge AI applications provide a production-ready, energy-efficient FPGA-based device with enough I/O to speed up vision and robotics tasks at an affordable price point. Combined with the Prophesee breakthrough Event-based vision technology, machine vision system developers can leverage the lower latency and lower power capabilities of the Metavision platform to experiment and create more efficient, and in many cases not previously possible, applications compared to traditional frame-based vision sensing approaches.

A breakthrough plug-and-play Active Markers Tracking application is included in this kit. It allows for >1,000Hz 3D pose estimation, with complete background rejection at pixel level while providing extreme robustness to challenging lighting conditions.

This application highlights unique features of Prophesee’s Event-based Metavision technologies, enabling a new range of ultra high-speed tracking use cases such as game controller tracking, construction site safety, heavy load anti-sway systems and many more.

Multiple additional ready-to-use application algorithms will be made available over the coming months.

The Prophesee Starter Kit provides an ‘out of the box’ development solution to quickly get up and running with the Prophesee Metavision SDK and IMX636 HD Event-based sensor realized in collaboration between Prophesee and Sony, allowing easy porting of algorithms to the AMD commercial and industrial-grade system-on-module (SOMs) powered by the custom-built Zynq™ UltraScale+™ multiprocessing SoC.

The new, Prophesee-enabled Kria KV260 AI Starter Kit will be on display at Automate 2024 in Prophesee’s booth 3452.

“The ever-expanding Kria ecosystem helps make motion capture, connectivity, and edge AI applications more accessible to roboticists and developers,” said Chetan Khona, Senior Director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets, AMD. “Prophesee Event-based Vision offers unique advantages for machine vision applications. Its low data consumption translates into efficient energy consumption, less compute and memory needed, and fast response times.”

“It’s never been easier to develop Event-based Edge applications with this combination of development aids from AMD and Prophesee,” said Luca Verre, Co-Founder and CEO of Prophesee. “We are providing everything needed to take complete advantage of the lower power processing and low latency performance inherent in Event-based Vision, as well as provide an environment to optimize machine vision system based on specific KPIs for customer-defined applications and use cases. This will further accelerate the adoption of Event-based Vision in key market segments that can benefit from Metavision’s unique advantages.”