In today’s fast-paced world, rapid verification in access control is not just a convenience; it's a necessity. Delays in access verification can lead to bottlenecks in high-traffic environments, disrupt operations, and degrade the user experience. More critically, the speed at which individuals can be verified and granted access can be a matter of life and death.
Low speed of processing and available performance headroom of the equipment used may increase the risk of missing detection of people or objects due to an inability to use more advanced and more reliable image processing, such as using the latest neural networks, such as YOLOv8, picking the best picture from several, alignment, and real-time matching.
Current AI accelerators have made significant strides in improving the efficiency of running vision AI models. However, they often face a trade-off between speed and accuracy, as they commonly deploy 8-bit integer inference arithmetic instead of 32-bit floating-point full-precision. High verification speeds can sometimes result in increased false positives and negatives, as the security and surveillance systems may not spend enough time analyzing the data to make accurate decisions. This is particularly problematic in access control, where errors can either compromise security by allowing unauthorized access or hinder operations by denying access to legitimate users. Therefore, eliminating false negatives and false positives in machine learning used for automatic identification is important.
Fortunately, Axelera AI solved the challenge of reducing precision of the mathematical computations without any practical accuracy loss, eliminating the false positives in security processes produced by vision AI accelerators.
To reach high performance, AI accelerators often deploy 8-bit integer processing of the most compute-intensive parts of neural network calculations instead of using 32-bit floating-point arithmetic. To do so, a quantization of the data from 32-bit to 8-bit needs to be done.
Axelera has developed a sophisticated quantization flow methodology and toolkit that does not require time-consuming retraining of models and only requires a fast calibration using a small subset of the image dataset. In combination with the mixed-precision arithmetic of the Axelera Metis AIPU, Axelera can deliver an accuracy practically indistinguishable from a reference 32-bit floating point model. As an example, Metis AIPU can run the ResNet50v1 neural network processing, at a full processing speed of 3,200 frames per second, with a relative accuracy of 99.9%.
The just-described hardware and software technologies are responsible for the excellent cost efficiency, power efficiency and accuracy of the Metis AIPU. It's why OEMs installing an Axelera AI accelerator, can reduce operational costs without increasing false positives in security. Or upgrade their biometric access control systems with an increased number of access control points connected to the edge server without loss of speed. This means that OEMs can offer competitively priced systems for AI access control, while contributing to sustainability efforts by minimizing energy consumption.
To assist OEMs in the Access Control and Surveillance industries, Axelera created 4 variants of the Metis Evaluation System consisting of a host system (x86 or ARM), a Metis PICe card, and the Voyager SDK. Providing an end-to-end system with sample code and ready-to-deploy AI processing, it helps OEMs simplify and accelerate the integration of advanced Vision AI technologies:
We invite Embedded Hardware Engineers and Machine Learning Specialists of original equipment manufacturers in the Surveillance & Security industry and independent software vendors to explore the potential of our Metis Evaluation System. Together, we can establish new standards for accuracy, cost efficiency, and energy efficiency of AI access control - and biometric access control systems in particular - creating safer and more efficient environments for everyone. We invite you to experience the remarkable capabilities of our Metis Evaluation System firsthand and join us in redefining the future of security and surveillance.
View the 4 versions of the Metis Evaluation System