Microsoft and Qualcomm launch Vision AI Developer Kit

Microsoft announced a partnership with the Qualcomm to provide with the Vision AI Developer Kit to accelerate machine learning and cognition around the visual technologies in edge devices.

Edge Services, which is often part of a larger solution, comes with the processors powerful enough to perform computing or cognitive tasks at the device level. This even cuts down on dependency and latency on the network.

As a part of the Kit, the companies are offering a camera that uses the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence 300 platform and the software which is needed to deploy or implement edge solutions with the help of Azure IoT Edge and Azure Machine Learning. Azure is Microsoft range of cloud computing services.

Executive Opinion

Principal Project Manager, Microsoft, Anne Yang, said, "Artificial intelligence (AI) workloads include megabytes of data and potentially billions of calculations. With advancements in hardware, it is now possible to run time-sensitive AI workloads on the edge while also sending outputs to the cloud for downstream applications. AI scenarios processed on the edge can facilitate important business scenarios, such as verifying if every person on a construction site is wearing a hardhat, or detecting whether items are out-of-stock on a store shelf."

Microsoft's Vision AI and Azure Services 

Microsoft is also offering the Custom Vision, an Azure Cognitive Service. With the help of Custom Vision, users or developers can build their own computer vision model.

These custom models can be accelerated with the camera's Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, which enables the image classification to run quickly even when offline.
Developers can take advantage of the "Visual Studio Code" to manage all their codes and access all the Azure services with the help of a single development environment.

The Kit, which was made by the Microsoft partner eInfochips, which will be sold and distributed by the Arrow Electronics, the announcement notes.