A few months back, Google began their AIY projects campaign to help developers experiment with and learn about artificial intelligence. AIY Voice Kit turned out to be a huge hit amongst people with brilliant ideas being implemented across the world. Now, Google have announced the AIY Vision Kit, one of the firsts from Google to feature an on- device neural network acceleration, providing extremely powerful computer vision without a cloud connection.

The Vision Kit is a do- it- yourself build. One needs to add a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Raspberry Pi Camera, an SD Card and a power supply. The components need to be purchased separately. Inside the kit, we get a cardboard outer shell, the VisionBonnet circuit board, an RGB arcade- style button, a piezo speaker, a macro/wide lens kit, a tripod mounting nut and other connecting component (jumpers, stranded wires, wire ribbons etc.)

VisionBonnet Circuit Board

The VisionBonnet forms the integral part of the whole vision kit. The bonnet features the Intel Movidius MA2450, a low- power vision processing unit capable of running neural network models on-device. The provided software includes three TensorFlow- based neural network models for different vision applications. One of them is based on MobileNets, which can recognize a very large number of common objects, another capable of recognizing faces and expressions, and a third to determine whether the camera is seeing a person, a cat, or a dog. It also comes with a tool to compile machine learning models for Vision Kit, so that we can train and retrain our models with TensorFlow on the workstations or any cloud device/service.

The kit also has support of a Python API that provides us with the ability to change the RGB button colours, adjust the piezo element sounds, and access the four GPIO pins as well.

Some examples of the kind of projects the Vision Kit can help realize are:

• Identify all kinds of plants and animal species

• See when your car left the driveway

• See if the guests are delighted by holiday decorations

• See if an intruder comes into your house or room

The AIY Vision Kit is expected to come out in early December. You can still pre-order it online through Micro Center.

More information : Google Blog