Toshiba’s Visconti™4 Image Recognition Processor Powers DENSO’s Front-Camera-Based Active Safety System

TOKYO--Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation today announced that DENSO Corporation (DENSO) is deploying Visconti^™4, its latest image-recognition processor dedicated to automotive applications, in next generation, front-camera-based active safety systems. Visconti^™4 is a leading-edge, multi-engine road-safety solution that provides drivers with real-time analytics of road conditions and potential dangers.

Electronic systems are taking on an increasingly central role in driving, including advanced driver assistance systems and support for autonomous vehicles, and particularly in promoting road safety. The latest iteration of the influential European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), the EU-backed safety standard, adds criteria for evaluating anti-collision features that improve protection for bicyclists and pedestrians.

The Visconti^™4 image recognition processor is equipped with eight media processing engines, allowing it to execute eight applications simultaneously. It can detect and analyze camera-generated images and recognizes traffic lanes; nearby vehicles, both parked and moving; traffic signs and signals; the headlights of oncoming vehicles; plus the most vulnerable road users of all, bicyclists and pedestrians.

Visconti™4 has double the number of processing engines of its predecessor, the Visconti^™2, used by DENSO since 2015. It also integrates a new image recognition algorithm, Enhanced CoHOG Accelerator^[1] that delivers enhanced processing of luminance differences between objects and their backgrounds to better detect pedestrians at night and low light conditions.

Toshiba and DENSO are also cooperating in AI, on the development of deep neural network-intellectual property (DNN-IP) for use in image recognition, and plan to bring this state-of-the-art technology to future additions to the Visconti series.

The global market of vehicle-mounted cameras is expected to approach $9.6 billion in 2021^[2]. Toshiba is committed respond to with automotive semiconductor solutions that further pursue traffic safety.