This project is a planning grant to investigate how to develop a research infrastructure for investigating energy-efficient computer vision. Computer vision is a set of technologies for understanding image or video. These technologies are essential in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles and airport security. Some vision systems need to be energy-efficient because they use batteries, for example, drones and mobile phones. This infrastructure is planned to be available for researchers to experiment and evaluate their solutions. The evaluation includes the success rates of identifying different types of objects, the speed, and the energy consumption. The infrastructure has three major components: (1) video taken by drones, (2) vision system analyzing the data, (3) power meter. It will be designed for a wide range of vision problems. It will also include a referee system which automates the entire evaluation process.
There are many beneficial applications for low-power computer vision, for example, lightweight cameras that may provide safety for the vision impaired, wearable cameras that may improve factory safety or perform inventory analysis, and cameras for observing wildlife. The planning grant is to assess the needs of such an infrastructure for academia and industry. This team will actively engage the research community.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
