“When you write, it’s only a very small portion [of pixels] that are involved,” said Qiangfei Xia, the Dev and Linda Gupta professor in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. “You do not have to process all the information you got from the entire screen, only those pixels you’re writing on.”
Their proof-of-concept sensor system can currently recognise patterns with 87% to 92% accuracy, faster and more energy-efficiently than traditional computational methods, he said.
The technology could also be applied to event-based visual sensors like traffic cameras. “During the daytime, it’s very busy. It makes a lot of sense,” Xia said. “But at 2 a.m., there is less traffic. If you keep doing 30 frames per second, you are wasting a lot of resources.”
