Taiwanese AIoT firm Advantech has launched a series of AI inference systems to address applications such as retail facial recognition, automatic optical inspection, robotics and intelligent transportation.

The Air series includes different designs to fit diverse AI applications. The company also provides the Edge AI suite, a software toolkit with graphical user interface and pre-trained AI models to help users enable AI inference on edge devices.

The series includes Air-100, Air-101 and Air-200, which integrate Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU, and Air-300, which supports a PCIe x16 high power graphic card.

Powered by Intel Atom x7-E3950 CPU and one Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU, Air-100 supports multi-4K display and is suitable for interactive kiosks and other retail applications with facial recognition functions.

Air-101 is for Din-rail design and 12-28V power input with Intel Atom E3940 quad-core processors and two Movidius Myriad X VPUs, and is suitable for AGV and factory automation applications.

For higher computing, Air-200 is an Intel Core i5 platform with two Movidius Myriad X VPUs; it supports up to 1080p video encoding, decoding and multi-channel processing suitable for traffic monitoring, licence plate recognition and vehicle classification applications.

The Air-300 uses an Intel Xeon E3 seventh and sixth generation Core i processor and a PCIe x16 graphics card to enable fast inference and on-premises training for robotics and optical inspection applications.

The Edge AI software toolkit integrates Intel OpenVino R3.1 toolkit to enable accelerated deep learning inference on edge devices and real-time monitoring of device status on the GUI dashboard.

The Edge AI v1.2 suite includes an optimised pre-trained Yolov 3 object detection model, popular in surveillance applications, which delivers 2.8x better performance on VPU than running with OpenVino only. It can execute the Yolov 3 model with VPU plus GPU heterogeneous acceleration to get five times better AI inference performance than using a single device.

Advantech specialises in IoT intelligent systems and embedded platforms.