Luxonis' Latest OAK Edge AI Camera Packs a Thermal Sensor for Data Fusion and Computer Vision

Computer vision specialist Luxonis has announced its latest OAK edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) camera, and this time it's not focusing on edge perception but heat — offering a thermal sensor good to a ±2 percent accuracy across a 256×192 resolution, which sits alongside a Sony IMX462 visible-light sensor for good measure.

"The decision to add a thermal sensor to OAK was made by our customers who frequently requested the ability to fuse thermal data with high resolution RGB all on a compact edge device," Luxonis' Bradley Dillon explains. "The OAK-T opens up all kinds of new potential applications such as detecting leaks that the vision based systems (and humans) are unable to detect. Additionally, the OAK-T will be useful for detecting humans & animals, monitoring equipment, detecting fires, and much more!"

The thermal side of the camera is based around an InfiRay Tiny1-C uncooled infrared thermal sensor module, which captures contactless temperature readings across a 256×192 resolution grid with a ±2 per cent (or ±2 degrees, whichever is larger) accuracy and a range of -15-150°C (5-302°F) at a frame rate up to 25 frames per second (FPS). Alongside this is the Sony IMX462 visible-light sensor, offering a 1920×1080 resolution and a capture rate up to 30 FPS.

"At Luxonis, we are sensor agnostic," Dillon says of the company's desire to branch out from depth-sensing devices. "What this means in practice is that we are continually adding new and improved sensors to our platform. We are not married to any one type of sensor or approach as we work towards our ultimate goal which is to enable robotic and automation systems to exceed human level perception at every task. Luxonis has also supported other sensor types for custom development projects."

In addition to the thermal and visible-light camera sensors, the weatherproof camera includes Power over Ethernet (PoE) support and a Bosh Sensortec BMI270 inertial measurement unit (IMU). To run everything full-tilt, the company claims, the camera pulls around 6.5W of power — with a 3-3.5W base consumption for video streaming, 1W to add the thermal sensor, another watt for the edge AI subsystem, and 0.5W each for the video encoder and stereo depth perception pipeline.

The OAK-T is due to launch in April, with Luxonis currently accepting pre-orders at $599 on its official store.