Dan Carney, Design News
January 13, 2023
Thermal cameras provide obvious nighttime crash-avoidance benefits but have been held back by cost.
Thermal now reminds me of lidar five years ago,” remarked Wade Appelman, chief marketing officer for Owl Autonomous Imaging in an interview at CES in Las Vegas.
The company specializes in infrared thermal cameras for driver assistance and the computer vision software that maximizes the benefit of such cameras. The obstacle to adopting infrared cameras is similar to that faced by lidar: “The challenge in thermal is to get the cost down,” he said
At CES, Owl debuted what it dubs the Thermal Ranger Platform, a thermal camera system combining the camera, an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin AI processor, and the Owl software suite. This includes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), ROS applications, AI/ML framework and drivers, and necessary cables and adapters. The CNNs operate on the thermal images to provide 3D Object classification and ranging information using the Robot Operating System (ROS) Publish/Subscribe interface.
Owl’s CMO Wade Appelman, was interviewed at CES 2023 by DesignNews Magazine, one of the world’s top design engineering publications, about the recent launch of the Evaluation Kit for their new Thermal Ranger™ ADAS & Autonomous Navigation Development Platform.
