SINGAPORE – Demand for self-driving cars and the safety it brings is rising, particularly in Japan, where a super-aging society has upped the stakes considerably in recent years.
Self-driving systems require high-level image recognition to see and understand its surroundings followed by decision making so that humans don’t have to. The latest version of Visconti 5 contributes to all these functions while also achieving lower power consumption than conventional processors.
There are two technologies that makeup Visconti. The first is image recognition, tasked with recognizing/detecting the other cars, pedestrians, and traffic lights from images on the vehicle-mounted cameras, and then assisting in taking action to prevent or avoid collisions, whether it be day or night. The other half of the technology that makes up Visconti is the embodiment of image recognition technology as a processor, which makes it viable as a business, a product.
Visconti was not simply the brainchild of Toshiba engineers but instead created with customers and their inputs. By thinking about the features and functions that customers will want in the future, and preparing solutions for these needs in advance, Toshiba is able to create products with features that reflect its strengths.
When Toshiba’s research in image recognition technology began half a century ago, AI and self-driving cars were an impossible dream. Many of Toshiba’s past engineers believed in the potential of image recognition technology and worked tirelessly to refine it, eventually developing it into what it is today. Today, the research continues under the lead of two engineers across the research and business divisions, Ryuzo Okada and Takashi Miyamori, who share a vision of making the world a better place with Visconti.