Sony Semiconductor Solutions Partners with Ultralytics

Sony Semiconductor Solutions has partnered with Ultralytics, a developer of AI-powered vision technology. The partnership will integrate Ultralytics’ YOLOv8 platform with Sony’s IMX500 intelligent vision sensor to enable real-time object detection capabilities on the edge. The integration allows YOLOv8 models to use advanced quantization and pruning techniques for greater efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

The integration of Ultralytics’ YOLOv8 platform with Sony’s IMX500 intelligent vision software is facilitated by Sony’s AITRIOS software platform, which acts as a bridge between complex AI models and the limitations of edge devices. Courtesy of Sony Semiconductor Solutions.

To facilitate the integration, the partners used on-chip non-maximum suppression to overcome postprocessing bottlenecks. The approach enables postprocessing to occur directly on the sensor, bypassing the need to transfer large amounts of data to a host device. The process quadrupled the performance of the YOLOv8 Nano model, according to Sony senior product manager Amir Servi.

The combination, the companies expect, will bring on-device AI capabilities to enhance real-time decision making for businesses relying on high-performance visual data processing.