Owl Autonomous Imaging Announces Monocular 3D Thermal Ranger Computer Vision and Evaluation Kit

January 11, 2023

News

At CES 2023, Owl Autonomous Imaging announced their new Thermal Ranger™ ADAS & Autonomous Navigation Development Platform designed to help improve object classification and distance measurements with a monocular thermal camera solution providing 2D & 3D perception, 3D segmentation, and RGB-to-thermal fusion when other cameras and perception sensors are impaired by the environment.

The platform consists of a thermal imaging camera, an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin AI processor, and the Owl AI software suite with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), ROS applications, AI/ML framework and drivers, and necessary cables and adapters.

The CNNs are designed to operate on the thermal images to enable 3D object classification and distance information using the Robot Operating System (ROS) Publish/Subscribe interface.

The company also announced the availability of a hardware and software Evaluation Kit, allowing Tier 1 and OEMs to evaluate the Thermal Ranger imaging solution for use in Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) and other ADAS applications supporting L2, L2+, and L3/L4 requirements. 

“Our unique, patented solutions deliver panoramic thermal imaging and dense range maps are superior to HDR RGB cameras, and/or LiDAR or RADAR sensors for difficult night and blinding light situations,” says Chuck Gershman, CEO of Owl Autonomous Imaging. “Unlike cumbersome stereo camera approaches, a single Owl AI 3D thermal camera delivers distance information throughout the entire field of view (FOV) and is immune to vehicle vibration for reliable and robust mapping."

Owl’s 3D Thermal Ranger provides VGA image resolution, is capable of operating during the day and at night and in all weather conditions, and classifies vulnerable road users (VRUs) including pedestrians, cyclists, animals, and vehicles, while determining position and direction to enable safe autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle operation. 

The company provides all required software and for the software required for operation of the NVIDIA processor, the following modules are included: 

• Owl AI/ML Neural Networks
• Autonomous Emergency Braking application
• 3D Birds-eye-view application
• Object segmentation
• Raw thermal video viewer
• Raw thermal video recorder
• Thermal with both 2D and 3D bounding boxes and colorized range data

The Evaluation Platform is available now.

For more information, visit: https://www.owlai.us/