FLIR Boson Camera Merges Thermal Imagery With AI

Flir Systems, a company that has built its name on thermal imaging, has partnered with Movidius for AI-powered imagery.

The companies on Monday announced that the Flir Boson, the company's latest thermal imaging camera core, will come with the Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit. The combination will create a single thermal imaging core, allowing for artificial intelligence to come to thermal imaging products.

"We're pleased to work with Movidius to deliver this amount of compute power into the size, weight and power requirements of the product you see today," Andy Teich, President and CEO of Flir Systems said in a statement. "With system-on-a-chip interfaces and machine intelligence capability available through Movidius, we enable Flir cores to make greater sense of the rich information being captured by our sensors."

The idea behind the partnership is simple: for cameras to understand what they're looking at. While Flir already has the ability to see thermal images, the addition of the Movidius Myriad 2 gives it some context. In other words, the camera core will be able to give the computer running inside the camera some information on what it might be seeing.

"Flir will be instrumental in deploying advanced computer vision in applications such as home security, personal vision systems, drones, law enforcement and defense," Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane said in a statement about how the partnership could work.

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