Amazon's AI camera helps developers harness image recognition

Far from the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence is becoming just another tool for developers to build the next big thing. It's built in to Photoshop to help you knock out backgrounds, Google is using AI to figure out if you have a person peeping on your phone and Microsoft uses the technology to teach you Chinese. As Amazon's Jeff Barr says, "I think it is safe to say, with the number of practical applications for machine learning, including computer vision and deep learning, that we've turned the corner" towards practical applications for AI. To that end, Amazon has announced AWS DeepLens, a new video camera that runs deep learning models right on the device.

The DeepLens has a 4 megapixel camera that can capture 1080P video, along with a 2D microphone array. It's powered by an Intel Atom Processor with more than 100 gigaflops of power, which means it can process tens of frames of video through the deep-learning AI systems per second. The DeepLens camera has WiFi, USB and micro HDMI ports, and 8 gigabytes of memory to run all that code on, too. It runs Ubuntu 16.04, and can connect to Amazon Web Serivces, too.