Sony Adds Microsoft-Powered Artificial Intelligence to IMX500 Video Camera Sensors

Sony (NYSE: SNE) is making video cameras smarter. The IMX500 line of intelligent video sensors will come with embedded access to artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure. Camera systems built around these sensor chips will be able to analyze their video streams in real time.

The IMX500 sensor is not made for smartphones, but for enterprise-class security cameras and monitors in industrial equipment systems. Paired with a custom data management, Sony's chipset can analyze the video stream locally. This setup can tackle many video analysis tasks that currently are done by a central server in the cloud, allowing the security system or industrial instrumentation to take action without contacting a server first.

The app-and-sensor pairing needs to be trained with the help of the full Azure cloud-computing system, passing key video analysis signals down from the cloud-based machine learning process to Sony's sensor management app.