If you’re looking to kick the tyres on some AI image processing/recognition tasks and you own an older Raspberry Pi, the new AI Camera add-on may be of interest.
While the $70 Raspberry Pi AI Kit only works with a Raspberry Pi 5, the $70 AI camera works with all of the Raspberry Pi boards which boast the relevant camera connector port (spoiler: most, including the Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi 400).
This product is the fruits of Raspberry Pi’s ongoing partnership with Sony Semiconductor Solutions, using the latter’s IMX500 image sensor and boasting a 12.3 MP resolution that should be good enough for exploring vision-based AI tasks.
An integrated RP2040 microcontroller enables the camera to handle onboard AI image processing (rather than stressing out the Pi itself), leaving the processor in your Raspberry Pi free to perform other tasks.
It’s this difference that sets the Raspberry Pi AI Camera apart from the AI kit since: no HAT, no additional camera, no Pi 5 required.
Better still, the camera’s AI processor is compatible with a fleet of popular neural network models, according to Raspberry Pi:
“Using Sony’s suite of AI tools, existing neural network models using frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch can be converted to run efficiently on the AI Camera. Alternatively, new models can be designed to take advantage of the AI accelerator’s specific capabilities.“
“The arrival of first the AI Kit, and now the AI Camera, opens up a whole new world of opportunities for high-resolution, high-frame rate, high-quality visual AI: we don’t know what you’re going to build with them, but we’re sure it will be awesome,”
Obviously, there are some tradeoffs. You can’t use the AI Camera to handle the same range of AI/ML workloads and models the AI Kit can, and if you own a Pi 5 and have an existing Camera Module 3 laying around, the kit will be a better buy.
The Raspberry Pi AI Camera is available to buy from Raspberry Pi’s approved resellers for $70/£62. Unapproved sellers will, naturally, charge more, so where possible buy from (and support) the maker stores.
More details on the camera, its spec, models and applications, and further video samples of it action tracking can be found on the Raspberry Pi news post.