Speaking of Texas Instruments, a few weeks ago the company introduced its new TMS320C6748 DSP Development Kit, which is intended to support real-time video analytics (specifically biometrics, for access control) applications such as fingerprint identification and face detection-and-recognition. From the press release:
The C6748 DSP development kit comes pre-loaded with TI's new C6748 SYS/BIOS Software Development Kit (SDK). This scalable development kit, available for the low price of $195, enables fast and easy development on the C6748 floating- and fixed-point DSP. TI's new C6748 SYS/BIOS SDK includes several demonstrations for biometric analytics applications, such as fingerprint recognition and face detection, offering a starting point for developing and demonstrating the real-time intelligence of TI's C674x DSPs.
The SDK also includes the latest SYS/BIOS real-time kernel; the C6748 StarterWare software package, which provides lightweight, operating-system-independent software libraries and utilities; Code Generation Tools; as well as DSP core performance benchmarks that show the real-time processing power of TI's C674x DSPs. The C6748 SYS/BIOS SDK enables developers to run demos in less than 10 minutes and begin creating DSP applications in less than one hour. In addition to the SDK, the C6748 DSP development kit includes Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE) v5.1…
TI's C6748 DSP development kit is software and pin-to-pin compatible across TI's C6748, C6746 and C6742 DSPs and software compatible with other TMS320C6000™ DSPs. In addition, developers can scale to the software and pin-for-pin compatible OMAP-L138 and OMAP-L132 DSP + ARM9™ processors to add high-level operating systems such as Linux as well as control and networking functionality for applications such as industrial control, medical diagnostics, and communications…An OMAP-L138 DSP + ARM9 development kit is available today for $195. This kit is supported by a new Linux SDK. This SDK, available at no cost, enables developers to begin writing code in less than one hour…TI also offers the OMAP-L138/C6748 evaluation module (EVM) for full-featured development. The EVM is available for $1,050.
Since the press release only explicitly mentions face detection and not face recognition, the latter a more robust biometric implementation, I asked TI for clarification. Here's what a company representative told me:
The demonstration that is on TI’s C6748 DSP development kit is for face detection, not face recognition. The face detection demo does use biometrics, but face recognition systems are able to take TI’s demo software one step further and identify an individual against a database. Our fingerprint recognition demonstration that’s included in the kit does do this database comparison. While TI didn’t take this extra step for the face detection demo, the C6748 DSP does have enough performance to enable customers to implement face recognition. In addition, the face detection software is a first step towards that functionality.
