Raspberry Pi launches AI Camera in partnership with Sony
Raspberry Pi and Sony have co-developed the Raspberry Pi AI Camera module – now on sale in Cambridge for £63.
You need a Raspberry Pi computer (any model) to connect the AI Camera to.
The camera is based on the Sony IMX500 Intelligent Vision Sensor. The IMX500 combines a 12-megapixel CMOS image sensor with on-board inferencing acceleration for a variety of common neural network models, enabling users to develop sophisticated vision-based AI applications without the need for a separate accelerator.
The new camera has chips and add-ons for AI developers. It has low power consumption and low latency, leaving the processor in your Raspberry Pi free to perform other tasks.
The camera end of the link is managed by an on-board RP2040 microcontroller; an attached 16MB flash device caches recently used models, allowing us to skip the upload step in many cases. The IMX500 also has 8GB of dedicated memory to handle most computing tasks.
Naush Patuck, author at Raspberry Pi, said: “People have been using Raspberry Pi products to build artificial intelligence projects for almost as long as we’ve been making them. As we’ve released progressively more powerful devices, the range of applications that we can support natively has increased; but in any generation there will always be some workloads that require an external accelerator, like the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, which we launched in June.
“The AI Kit is an awesomely powerful piece of hardware, capable of performing thirteen trillion operations per second. But it is only compatible with Raspberry Pi 5, and requires a separate camera module to capture visual data. We are very excited therefore to announce a new addition to our camera product line: the Raspberry Pi AI Camera.”