april, 2016 - even though they are a 38-year-old company, flir system’s advanced, miniaturized thermal imaging sensors and cameras keep them hip in the world of computer vision where mobile startups are propelling the field. this morning they announced a new product—the boson thermal camera. the boson is a small thermal camera and can be used for many applications like:

• thermal imaging—recognizable to most of us as the “predator vision” demonstrated by the alien in the 80s schwarzenegger film
• facial recognition for various security or marketing efforts
• pedestrian detection (e.g. being able to detect the number of humans in a certain area and their movement or activity level)

miniaturization

the boson is half the size, one tenth the volume, one seventh the weight and twice as power efficient as the previous model made by flir which was called the tau 2. this miniaturization is made possible by flir’s partnership with movidius—the makers of the new myriad 2 chip that powers it. movidius’s tiny 12-core, low power processor (which we’ve covered before) allows the boson camera to get much, much smaller.

system-on-sensor

this leads to the second trend: system-on-sensor. not only are there size benefits by bringing the processor directly into the sensor, there are new abilities in the sensor itself. the 12 cores on the myriad 2 chip are fully programmable which means the boson can directly process images, combine thermal pixel information, or process facial recognition algorithms, directly on the boson itself, in real-time. this camera doesn’t need to offload this processing to another subsystem or to the cloud.

see full article here at tech crunch

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