Last year, Microsoft had announced a developer kit with Qualcomm to accelerate AI inferencing at the intelligent Edge. Microsoft has now announced that the Vision AI Developer Kit was now broadly available.
The Microsoft Vision AI developer kit includes a camera, which uses Qualcomm’s Vision Intelligence 300 Platform, and the software needed to develop intelligent Edge solutions using Azure IoT Edge and Azure Machine Learning.
It supports an end-to-end Azure enabled solution with real-time image processing locally on the edge device, and model training and management on Azure. The Developer Kit, made by partner eInfochips, can now be ordered from Arrow Electronics.
Here’s what you can do with the Microsoft Vision AI Developer Kit:
You can deploy vision models at the intelligent Edge in minutes, regardless of your current machine learning skill level.
Developers can use Custom Vision, an Azure Cognitive Service, to build your computer vision model, even if you’re not a data scientist. It provides a user-friendly interface that walks you through the process for uploading your data, training, and deploying customer vision models including image tagging.
The Vision AI Developer Kit integration with Custom Vision includes the ability to use Azure IoT Hub to deploy your custom vision model directly to the developer kit. These custom vision models are then accelerated using the camera’s Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (SNPE), which enables image classification to run quickly even when offline.
Developers can get started with Azure Machine Learning using reference implementations provided in Jupyter notebooks. These reference implementations walk data scientists through the steps to upload training data to Azure Blob Storage, run a transfer learning experiment, convert the trained model to be compatible with the developer kit platform, and deploy via Azure IoT Edge.
Microsoft said on its official blog that in order to take full advantage of the developer kit, install the AI DevKit extension for Visual Studio Code. That allows you to deploy modules, see messages from the device, manage your Azure IoT Hub, and more.
Via: Microsoft Azure blog
Image Credit: Microsoft Azure