LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — MediaTek today announced the launch of several new AI products for the smart home, including the latest generation of MediaTek’s TV AI picture quality (PQ) technology, the new MT8175 AI vision platform for smart displays and smart cameras, and the new MT8518 AI voice platform for portable smart speakers. These new solutions continue MediaTek’s vision to bring edge AI everywhere by creating a wide-ranging ecosystem of edge AI hardware processing solutions paired with comprehensive software tools. Today MediaTek is bringing the latest AI innovations to smart homes, wearables, smartphones, autonomous cars and other connected devices.
“AI is reshaping how we interact with technology, from taking pictures on our phones to checking the weather on our voice assistants, streaming content on our TVs and navigating in our cars. MediaTek’s high performance and power efficient solutions are ideally suited to meet the processing needs of AI devices,” said Jerry Yu, Sr. Corporate Vice President of MediaTek’s Intelligent Devices business unit. “We have been seeing that AI is moving beyond voice to vision, and from the cloud to the edge, so MediaTek is supporting a wide range of AI capabilities on voice assistant devices (VAD), including smart devices with a display and camera. Our latest AI innovations are bringing consumers a better viewing experience with our TV AI PQ technology, faster and more precise image capturing quality with MT8175 for smart displays and smart cameras, and more seamless processing between cloud and edge in VAD with MT8518, enabling our customers to take advantage of the big opportunity to bring voice assistants to the portable speaker market.”
The latest generation of MediaTek’s TV AI PQ technology brings AI enhancements like scene detection, which includes face detection within scenes, to digital TVs. With scene detection capabilities, smart TVs can differentiate between frames with people and other types of scenes – such as a landscape, indoor scene or sports arena – to automatically adjust the sharpness for maximum picture quality, and also fine-tune the appearance of skin tone at the same time. Conventional picture quality can’t precisely distinguish each scene – between skin tones and landscapes – so it delivers a “balance” or compromise on picture quality settings. With AI PQ and intelligent processing, MediaTek delivers truer picture quality without compromises.
MediaTek’s TV AI PQ technology works by flagging different types of scenes with AI, and then processing this information with the PQ engine to apply the scene-adaptive PQ settings. As the No. 1 chipmaker for smart TVs, MediaTek has always been at the forefront of digital TV innovation. In 2017, MediaTek became the first system-on-chip (SoC) vendor to complete evaluation tests with Verance Aspect, an essential component of the Next Gen TV transmission standard (ATSC 3.0).
“Voice assistants integrated with displays and cameras will bring users a more interactive experience and even more useful capabilities thanks to MediaTek’s MT8175 AI vision platform,” said Yu. “In addition to enhancing the viewing experience, MT8175 equips devices with the latest image signal processing (ISP) and AI process unit (APU) technologies to make image capturing faster, clearer and with lower power consumption.”
As the No. 1 chipmaker for voice assistant devices, MediaTek’s new MT8518 AI voice SoC will bring VAD to a new era with low power voice wakeup and streaming playback along with powerful edge AI capability, including 10x longer standby time of low power voice wake up, low power far-field command, local speaker identification and local voice command. For music streaming, MT8518’s low power playback can provide 2x longer playback time compared to previous generation solutions.
“Our customers are very excited about the edge AI and low power capabilities of MT8518,” said Yu. “The low power voice wake-up to extend battery life is a big breakthrough in the portable smart speaker market, along with our PowerAQTM, the powerful acoustic tuning tool which has been adopted by many audio brands for superior audio quality.”
To learn more about how MediaTek is enabling AI at the edge, please visit: https://www.mediatek.com/
