Seeed Studio's reCamera Is a Modular Edge AI Smart Camera Powered by Sophgo's SG2002
Driven by a chip with a one TOPS neural coprocessor, the reCamera launches soon — and alpha samples are now available.
Seeed Studio is preparing to launch what it claims is the "most advanced AI camera" around, the reCamera — a modular RISC-V smart camera platform capable of running computer vision and artificial intelligence (CV and AI) models on device using an integrated one tera-operations per second (TOPS) accelerator.
"reCamera is a combination of a processor and a camera sensor," the company explains of its creation. "Today, as processors (both SOC [System-on-Chip] and MCU [Microcontroller Unit]) are becoming smaller and more powerful, it is now possible to combine the processor with camera sensors. In fact, many IPCs (IP Cameras) are already using this design to accelerate AI detection on edge devices. So today, we introduce reCamera, an open-source camera platform for everyone to play with."
While there are a range of other smart camera systems on the market, Seeed is hoping to make the reCamera stand out thanks to a compact footprint and modular design — split into three boards: the Core Board, the Sensor Board, and the Base board. The Core Board hosts the processor, local storage, and optional Wi-Fi connectivity; the Sensor Board houses a choice of image sensors, with rolling- and global-shutter variants planned; and the Base Board provides USB Type-C and UART serial connectivity, microSD Card storage, and — model-dependent — features such as an Ethernet port with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) compatibility or CAN bus connectivity.
Two variants of Core Board have been revealed, only one of which will be available at launch: the C1_2002w, which includes emmC storage and a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio module; a C1_2002 will follow, which drops the Wi-Fi/BLE radio in favour of extra SDIO and UART connectivity. In both cases they're powered by the Sophgo SG2002, a dual-core chip that offers the user's choice of Arm Cortex-A53 or T-Head XuanTie C906 RISC-V core alongside an MCS-51 8051-compatible microcontroller core and a one TOPS neural coprocessor for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) tasks.
The Core Board stacks with the Sensor Board, of which only one is expected to be available at launch: the S1_OV5647, based on an Omnivision five megapixel rolling-shutter image sensor. Two others have been confirmed as works-in-progress: the S2_IMX335, which uses a Sony IMX335 rolling-shutter image sensor; and the S3_SC130GS, based on a SmartSens one-megapixel global shutter that trades resolution for capturing the entire image in once shot.
The standard Base Board, meanwhile, includes a microSD Card slot, an Ethernet single-port transformer module, a UART serial bus, and USB Type-C connector for data and power. A "B2" variant swaps from a side-mount to a vertical-mount USB Type-C port, while the "B3_POE" drops the USB connector and microSD Card slot for an Ethernet port with PoE support. The final model, the "B4_Gyro," comes an on-board gyroscope sensor and a connector for CAN bus connectivity — though all models bar the "B1" default were, at the time of writing, at version 0.1 and are not expected to be available at launch.
In all cases, the boards are controlled using a Linux buildroot system dubbed reCamera OS, which offers a web interface for network configuration, live view, and a browser-based system for opening a shell on the camera for command-line control. The accelerator is available in frameworks including TensorFlow and PyTorc, Seeed has confirmed, Seed has also confirmed three related projects: the reCamera Gimbal, which is an open-source motorized gimbal mount and housing for the camera; the reCamera Industrial, which provides a rugged housing with tripod mount and interchangeable lens support; and the reCamera Robot Arm which, as the name implies, mates the camera with a robotic arm.
Seed is launching the reCamera at $34.90 for a non-WiFi/BLE version with 8GB eMMC rising to $54.90 for a Wi-Fi/BLE version with 64GB eMMC, and has begun selling discount coupons which will shave 50% off the cost of the top-end model for $5 on the company store for a limited number of early-bird buyers.
Additional information is available in the project's GitHub repository, where some design files have been released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license; the reCamera OS is available in a separate repository. Those interested in receiving a sample prior to the official launch, meanwhile, can apply to become an alpha tester.