BAE, Northrop, Raytheon to Develop 'Smart' Event-Based Cameras for DARPA

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected three teams of researchers led by BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) and Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX) to produce low-latency, low-power, event-based infrared cameras as part of the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics program.

“Event-based cameras operate under these same principles when dealing with sparse scenes, but currently lack advanced ‘intelligence’ to perform more difficult perception and control tasks,” Whitney Mason, FENCE program manager, said in a statement published Friday.

“The goal is to develop a ‘smart’ sensor that can intelligently reduce the amount of information that is transmitted from the camera, narrowing down the data for consideration to only the most relevant pixels,” added Mason.

The three research teams led by the three companies will develop a low-latency, read-out integrated circuit and a processing layer for identifying temporal and spatial signals and then integrate them to come up with a low-power FENCE sensor.

DARPA expects the FENCE program to result in the development of neuromorphic camera technologies to support future military applications, including robotics, infrared search and tracking and autonomous vehicles.

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