Wi-Fi Certified 6 Program Available for Products based on Broadcom, Cypress, Intel, Marvell, and Qualcomm 802.11ax Chips

WiFi 6 Certified

Last year the WiFi alliance introduces a new naming scheme for WiFi using numbers instead of IEEE standards so that WiFI 4 is 802.11n, WiFi 5 is 802.11ac, and WiFi 6 is the latest 802.11ax standard with data throughput up to 10 Gbps, and a better ability to manage high-density scenarios. Shortly after (November 2018) we also got news of the first WiFi 6 routers from ASUS and NETGEAR, but the WiFi alliance only just announced the launch of their Wi-Fi Certified 6 program that promises optimal interoperability and security. The program will make sure the following features are properly implemented: WPA3 WiFi security Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA): effectively shares channels to increase network efficiency and lower latency for both uplink and downlink traffic in high demand environments Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO): allows more downlink data to be transferred at once and enables an access point […]

CDVA (Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis) Enable “Video Understanding”

SuperCDVA CDVA Video Understanding

One of the most popular applications of artificial intelligence is object detection where you have models capable of detecting objects or subjects being cats, dogs, cars, laptops, or other. As I discovered in a press release by Gyrfalcon, there’s something similar for videos called CDVA (Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis) that’s capable of analyzing the scene taking place, and describe it in a precise manner. The CDVA standard, aka MPEG ISO/IEC 15938-15, describes how video features can be extracted and stored as compact metadata for efficient matching and scalable search. Gyrfalcon published a press release, their Lightspeeur line of AI chips will adapt CDVA. You can get the technical details in that paper entitled “Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis: the Emerging MPEG Standard”. CDVA still relies on (CNN Convoluted Neural Network) but do so but extracting frames first, append a timestamp and the encoded CDVA descriptor to the video, which […]

MPEG Video Coding for Machines (VCM) is in the Works

VCM Video Coding for Machines

A video codec for machines seems like a good topic for the first of April, or an article on the Onion. But based on a recent press release by Gyrfalcon Technology, this may become a real thing as the company partnered with China Telecom, and proposed a new video codec called “Video Coding for machines” (VCM) that provides compression coding for machine vision and human-machine hybrid vision. Apparently a recent study published by Cisco in 2018, humans will become bit players in the “video watching business”, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications will represent the greatest usage of Internet video traffic over the next four years. So the goal of the VCM group will be to establish a new standard that will improve the previous generation video coding and decoding standards such as H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC) and H.266 (VVC). Few details are provided so far, and I can’t find any VCM […]

FiRa Consortium Ultra Wide-Band Ecosystem To Deliver Precise Indoor Positioning

How does UWB work

The FiRa Consortium has just been established by the ASSA ABLOY Group which includes HID Global, and NXP Semiconductors, Samsung Electronics, and Bosch, and joined by Sony Imaging Products & Solutions Inc, LitePoint and the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) in order to grow the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) ecosystem providing accurate positioning for a variety of mobile and consumer applications. The FiRa stands for “Fine Ranging”, and UWB technology relies on the IEEE 802.15.4z standard that provides real-time centimeter accuracy indoor positioning. The consortium claims “UWB technology outperforms other technologies in terms of accuracy, power consumption, robustness in RF connection, and security, by a wide margin”, especially in challenging environments. The main roles of the FiRa Consortium will be to develop an interoperability standard, and promote the development of UWB applications. Some of the use cases include: Seamless Access Control – UWB can identify an individual’s approach toward or away from a […]

DisplayPort 2.0 to Support 16K Displays thanks to its 80 Gbps Bandwidth

DisplayPort 2.0

4K monitors and TVs are now very common, and 8K displays, media players and camera are just coming to market and there’s still pretty expensive and content is basically nonexistent. 8K displays must be quite large or viewers must sit really close to get any benefit over 4K, but some people think 16K displays will be a thing in the not-to-distant future. Announced in 2016, DisplayPort 1.4 took care of 8K 60Hz output thanks to a 32.4 Gbps link bandwidth and compression, but the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has now announced DisplayPort 2.0 standard with support for one 16K display at up to 60 Hz, or two 4K displays at up to 144 Hz with HDR thanks to a 80 Gbps link bandwidth / 77.4 Gbps payload bandwidth. DisplayPort 2.0 will work with either native DP connectors or USB Type-C connectors with DisplayPort Alt Mode for video and audio. […]

802.15.4z Standard to Provide Real-time Centimeter Accuracy Indoor Positioning

802.15.4z timing method

GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) solutions like GPS or Beidou offers outdoor positioning with an accuracy of about 2-in-3 meters in optimal conditions for consumer devices, and starting in 2022, the upcoming GPS III will bring that down to as low as 1 meter again in consumer devices. For that only works for outdoor positioning, and for indoor positioning we’ve already covered WiFi RTT, and Bluetooth proximity beacons. The latter has been around for a while, but does not really provide accurate indoor positioning since they’d usually report the distance with less than 10 meters accuracy, and the lag is fairly large with 3 to 6 seconds needed to estimate the distance. The recently released Bluetooth 5.1 specification addresses this issue by enabling location services accurate to within 10 centimeters thanks to a new direction-finding capability made possible with an antenna array. However, as pointed out by EETAsia, there’s another […]

Wi-Fi EasyMesh is a Standard for WiFi Mesh Networking

WiFi EasyMesh

It’s been possible for add multiple WiFi routers and/or WiFi repeaters in order to provide good coverage in a house / building for years, so this required some manual configuration. So in recent years, companies came up with WiFi mesh networking solutions that do very much the same, but are easier to setup, and – as I understand it – mostly plug-and-play. Some examples are Google WiFi router or eeRo Pro WiFi system,  but apparently so far every company would do their own proprietary WiFi mesh implementation, so you would not be able to mix brands for such features. That’s why the WiFi Alliance worked on, and now announced Wi-Fi EasyMesh, an industry standard  for “simple to use, self-organizing, smart Wi-Fi networks”. Key benefits listed by the organization: Flexible design – Allows for best placement of multiple APs providing extended coverage Easy setup – Delivers automatic device on-boarding and configuration […]

Khronos Group Releases Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF) 1.0 Specification

The Khronos Group, the organization behind widely used standards for graphics, parallel computing, or vision processing such as OpenGL, Vulkan, or OpenCL, has recently published NNEF 1.0 (Neural Network Exchange Format) provisional specification for universal exchange of trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. NNEF aims to reduce machine learning deployment fragmentation by enabling data scientists and engineers to easily transfer trained networks from their chosen training framework into various inference engines via a single standardized exchange format. NNEF encapsulates a complete description of the structure, operations and parameters of a trained neural network, independent of the training tools used to produce it and the inference engine used to execute it. The new format has already been tested with tools such as TensorFlow, Caffe2, Theano, Chainer, MXNet, and PyTorch. Khronos has also released open source tools to manipulate NNEF files, including a NNEF syntax parser/validator, and example exporters, which can […]

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