Posted by The Coral Team
Moving into the fall, the Coral platform continues to grow with the release of the M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU. Its first application is in Google’s Series One room kits where it helps to remove interruptions and makes the audio clearer for better video meetings. To help even more folks build products with Coral intelligence, we’re dropping the prices on several of our products. And for those folks that are looking to level up their at home video production, we’re sharing a demo of a pose based AI director to make multi-camera video easier to make.
Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU
The newest addition to our product family brings two Edge TPU co-processors to systems in an M.2 E-key form factor. While the design requires a dual bus PCIe M.2 slot, it brings enhanced ML performance (8 TOPS) to tasks such as running two models in parallel or pipelining one large model across both Edge TPUs.
The ability to scale across multiple edge accelerators isn’t limited to only two Edge TPUs. As edge computing expands to local data centers, cell towers, and gateways, multi-Edge TPU configurations will be required to help process increasingly sophisticated ML models. Coral allows the use of a single toolchain to create models for one or more Edge TPUs that can address many different future configurations.
A great example of how the Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU is being used is in the Series One meeting room kits for Google Meet.
The new Series One room kits for Google Meet run smarter with Coral intelligence
Google’s new Series One room kits use our Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU to bring enhanced audio clarity to video meetings. TrueVoice®, a multi-channel noise cancellation technology, minimizes distractions to ensure every voice is heard with up to 44 channels of echo and noise cancellation, making distracting sounds like snacking or typing on a keyboard a concern of the past.
Enabling the clearest possible communication in challenging environments was the target for the Google Meet hardware team. The consideration of what makes a challenging environment was not limited to unusually noisy environments, such as lunchrooms doubling as conference rooms. Any conference room can present challenging acoustics that make it difficult for all participants to be heard.
The secret to clarity without expensive and cumbersome equipment is to use virtual audio channels and AI driven sound isolation. Read more about how Coral was used to enhance and future-proof the innovative design.
Expanding the AI edge
Earlier this year, we reduced the prices of our prototyping devices and sensors. We are excited to share further price drops on more of our products. Our System-on-Module is now available for $99.99, and our Mini PCIe Accelerator, M.2 Accelerator A+E Key, and M.2 Accelerator B+M key are now available at $24.99. We hope this lower price will make our edge AI more accessible to more creative minds around the world. Later, this month our SoM offering will also expand to include 2 and 4GB RAM options.
Multi-cam with AI
As we expand our platform and product family, we continue to keep new edge AI use cases in mind. We are continually inspired by our developer community’s experimentation and implementations. When recently faced with the challenges of multicam video production from home, Markku Lepistö, Solutions Architect at Google Cloud, created this real-time pose-based multicam tool he so aptly dubbed, AI Director.
We love seeing such unique implementations of on-device ML and invite you to share your own projects and feedback at coral-support@google.com.
For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform.
Posted by the Coral Team
Summer has arrived along with a number of Coral updates. We're happy to announce a new partnership with balena that helps customers build, manage, and deploy IoT applications at scale on Coral devices. In addition, we've released a series of updates to expand platform compatibility, make development easier, and improve the ML capabilities of our devices.
First up, our Edge TPU runtime is now open-source and available on GitHub, including scripts and instructions for building the library for Linux and Windows. Customers running a platform that is not officially supported by Coral, including ARMv7 and RISC-V can now compile the Edge TPU runtime themselves and start experimenting. An open source runtime is easier to integrate into your customized build pipeline, enabling support for creating Yocto-based images as well as other distributions.
Coral customers can now also use the Mini PCIe and M.2 accelerators on the Microsoft Windows platform. New Windows drivers for these products complement the previously released Windows drivers for the USB accelerator and make it possible to start prototyping with the Coral USB Accelerator on Windows and then to move into production with our Mini PCIe and M.2 products.
We’ve also made a number of new updates to our ML tools:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install edgetpu
We are excited to share that the Balena fleet management platform now supports Coral products!
Companies running a fleet of ML-enabled devices on the edge need to keep their systems up-to-date with the latest security patches in order to protect data, model IP and hardware from being compromised. Additionally, ML applications benefit from being consistently retrained to recognize new use cases with maximum accuracy. Coral + balena together, bring simplicity and ease to the provisioning, deployment, updating, and monitoring of your ML project at the edge, moving early prototyping seamlessly towards production environments with many thousands of devices.
Read more about all the benefits of Coral devices combined with balena container technology or get started deploying container images to your Coral fleet with this demo project.
Mendel Linux (5.0 release Eagle) is now available for the Coral Dev Board and SoM and includes a more stable package repository that provides a smoother updating experience. It also brings compatibility improvements and a new version of the GPU driver.
Last but not least, we’ve recently released BodyPix, a Google person-segmentation model that was previously only available for TensorFlow.JS, as a Coral model. This enables real-time privacy preserving understanding of where people (and body parts) are on a camera frame. We first demoed this at CES 2020 and it was one of our most popular demos. Using BodyPix we can remove people from the frame, display only their outline, and aggregate over time to see heat maps of population flow.
Here are two possible applications of BodyPix: Body-part segmentation and anonymous population flow. Both are running on the Dev Board.
We’re excited to add BodyPix to the portfolio of projects the community is using to extend our models far beyond our demos—including tackling today’s biggest challenges. For example, Neuralet has taken our MobileNet V2 SSD Detection model and used it to implement Smart Social Distancing. Using the bounding box of person detection, they can compute a region for safe distancing and let a user know if social distance isn’t being maintained. The best part is this is done without any sort of facial recognition or tracking, with Coral we can accomplish this in real-time in a privacy preserving manner.
We can’t wait to see more projects that the community can make with BodyPix. Beyond anonymous population flow there’s endless possibilities with background and body part manipulation. Let us know what you come up with at our community channels, including GitHub and StackOverflow.
We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we continue to evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, including balena, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com.
MediaPipe is a framework for building cross platform multimodal applied ML pipelines that consist of fast ML inference, classic computer vision, and media processing (e.g. video decoding). MediaPipe was open sourced at CVPR in June 2019 as v0.5.0. Since our first open source version, we have released various ML pipeline examples like
In this blog, we will introduce another MediaPipe example: Object Detection and Tracking. We first describe our newly released box tracking solution, then we explain how it can be connected with Object Detection to provide an Object Detection and Tracking system.
Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team
We’re committed to evolving Coral to make it even easier to build systems with on-device AI. Our team is constantly working on new product features, and content that helps ML practitioners, engineers, and prototypers create the next generation of hardware.
To improve our toolchain, we're making the Edge TPU Compiler available to users as a downloadable binary. The binary works on Debian-based Linux systems, allowing for better integration into custom workflows. Instructions on downloading and using the binary are on the Coral site.
We’re also adding a new section to the Coral site that showcases example projects you can build with your Coral board. For instance, Teachable Machine is a project that guides you through building a machine that can quickly learn to recognize new objects by re-training a vision classification model directly on your device. Minigo shows you how to create an implementation of AlphaGo Zero and run it on the Coral Dev Board or USB Accelerator.
Our distributor network is growing as well: Arrow will soon sell Coral products.
Coral has been public for about a month now, and we’ve heard some great feedback about our products. As we evolve the Coral platform, we’re making our products easier to use and exposing more powerful tools for building devices with on-device AI.
Today, we're updating the Edge TPU model compiler to remove the restrictions around specific architectures, allowing you to submit any model architecture that you want. This greatly increases the variety of models that you can run on the Coral platform. Just be sure to review the TensorFlow ops supported on Edge TPU and model design requirements to take full advantage of the Edge TPU at runtime.
We're also releasing a new version of Mendel OS (3.0 Chef) for the Dev Board with a new board management tool called Mendel Development Tool (MDT).
To help with the developer workflow, our new C++ API works with the TensorFlow Lite C++ API so you can execute inferences on an Edge TPU. In addition, both the Python and C++ APIs now allow you to run multiple models in parallel, using multiple Edge TPU devices.
In addition to these updates, we’re adding new capabilities to Coral with the release of the Environmental Sensor Board. It’s an accessory board for the Coral Dev Platform (and Raspberry Pi) that brings sensor input to your models. It has integrated light, temperature, humidity, and barometric sensors, and the ability to add more sensors via it's four Grove connectors. The secure element on-board also allows for easy communication with the Google Cloud IOT Core.
The team has also been working with partners to help them evaluate whether Coral is the right fit for their products. We’re excited that Oivi has chosen us to be the base platform of their new handheld AI-camera. This product will help prevent blindness among diabetes patients by providing early, automated detection of diabetic retinopathy. Anders Eikenes, CEO of Oivi, says “Oivi is dedicated towards providing patient-centric eye care for everyone - including emerging markets. We were honoured to be selected by Google to participate in their Coral alpha program, and are looking forward to our continued cooperation. The Coral platform gives us the ability to run our screening ML models inside a handheld device; greatly expanding the access and ease of diabetic retinopathy screening.”
Finally, we’re expanding our distributor network to make it easier to get Coral boards into your hands around the world. This month, Seeed and NXP will begin to sell Coral products, in addition to Mouser.
We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
You can see the full release notes on Coral site.
Posted by Billy Rutledge (Director) and Vikram Tank (Product Mgr), Coral Team
AI can be beneficial for everyone, especially when we all explore, learn, and build together. To that end, Google's been developing tools like TensorFlow and AutoML to ensure that everyone has access to build with AI. Today, we're expanding the ways that people can build out their ideas and products by introducing Coral into public beta.
Coral is a platform for building intelligent devices with local AI.
Coral offers a complete local AI toolkit that makes it easy to grow your ideas from prototype to production. It includes hardware components, software tools, and content that help you create, train and run neural networks (NNs) locally, on your device. Because we focus on accelerating NN's locally, our products offer speedy neural network performance and increased privacy — all in power-efficient packages. To help you bring your ideas to market, Coral components are designed for fast prototyping and easy scaling to production lines.
Our first hardware components feature the new Edge TPU, a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high-performance ML inferencing for low-power devices. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet V2 at 100+ fps, in a power efficient manner.
Coral Camera Module, Dev Board and USB Accelerator
For new product development, the Coral Dev Board is a fully integrated system designed as a system on module (SoM) attached to a carrier board. The SoM brings the powerful NXP iMX8M SoC together with our Edge TPU coprocessor (as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RAM, and eMMC memory). To make prototyping computer vision applications easier, we also offer a Camera that connects to the Dev Board over a MIPI interface.
To add the Edge TPU to an existing design, the Coral USB Accelerator allows for easy integration into any Linux system (including Raspberry Pi boards) over USB 2.0 and 3.0. PCIe versions are coming soon, and will snap into M.2 or mini-PCIe expansion slots.
When you're ready to scale to production we offer the SOM from the Dev Board and PCIe versions of the Accelerator for volume purchase. To further support your integrations, we'll be releasing the baseboard schematics for those who want to build custom carrier boards.
Our software tools are based around TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite. TF Lite models must be quantized and then compiled with our toolchain to run directly on the Edge TPU. To help get you started, we're sharing over a dozen pre-trained, pre-compiled models that work with Coral boards out of the box, as well as software tools to let you re-train them.
For those building connected devices with Coral, our products can be used with Google Cloud IoT. Google Cloud IoT combines cloud services with an on-device software stack to allow for managed edge computing with machine learning capabilities.
Coral products are available today, along with product documentation, datasheets and sample code at g.co/coral. We hope you try our products during this public beta, and look forward to sharing more with you at our official launch.
On November 14th, we announced the developer preview of TensorFlow Lite, TensorFlow's lightweight solution for mobile and embedded devices.
Today, in collaboration with Apple, we are happy to announce support for Core ML! With this announcement, iOS developers can leverage the strengths of Core ML for deploying TensorFlow models. In addition, TensorFlow Lite will continue to support cross-platform deployment, including iOS, through the TensorFlow Lite format (.tflite) as described in the original announcement.
Support for Core ML is provided through a tool that takes a TensorFlow model and converts it to the Core ML Model Format (.mlmodel).
For more information, check out the TensorFlow Lite documentation pages, and the Core ML converter. The pypi pip installable package is available here: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tfcoreml/0.1.0.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Happy TensorFlow Lite coding!
