Luxonis has introduced MegaAI, which is an ultra-compact, low power, depthAI-compatible computer vision module that supports 4k30 encode and 4k60 streaming from an on-board camera module. With AI/CV pipeline properly engineered into a tiny, embeddable form factor, MegaAI becomes the best bet for engineers and researchers if they want to directly integrate by OEMs and expand the AI processing capability of their project.
MegaAI is powered by Intel's Myriad X neural processing unit (NPU) and offers 4 TOPS of compute performance alongside 12-megapixel hardware JPEG encoding and hardware H.264 and H.265 encoding at up to 4k resolution and 30 frames per second, although 60 frames per second are ensured. There are many pre-trained models like age recognition, COVID-19 mask, face detection, facial landmark, general object detection (20-class) vehicle detection, etc. that help you get the neural network models right away (many of them are directly available for free from Intel).
The module takes difficult computer vision tasks (like real-time object detection and tracking) and makes them as simple as plugging in a USB cable and running a Python script easy. With it, cloning DepthAI git repository and running python depthai.py can be done with ease to see a live demonstration of MobileNetSSD being run on the host system. Also, it helps users to record live 4K, 30 FPS video of everything the camera sees.
As MegaAI does so much processing on its own (including optionally compressing video), the load on both USB and the CPU is lowered significantly, which leads to help get higher frame rates, bringing low-power hardware acceleration to any project. The module can be used for automatic 4K filming, agriculture/food processing, health/safety purposes like detecting unsafe conditions, mining for Legos, running real-time defect detection, looking for specific defects, and having the system get better over time.
MegaAI is a ready-for-manufacture product and all four original DepthAI boards with additional features above and beyond the ones promised during that campaign are delivered.
