The ability to create powerful images is in the hands of everybody on the planet. That was the word from Jem Davies, VP of Technology for ARM’s imaging and vision group, to an audience of 4500 engineers and executives who work with embedded technologies. They had gathered last week at ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, Calif.

“The technology we have helped create has changed the behavior of the people of the world,” Davies said.

But, he believes, the true revolution—when all the digital devices that surround us can understand what they see—is still to come.

“We can capture and display great images,” Davies says. “The next leap in computing will be in how we interpret images. That will be revolutionary.”

Bringing image understanding into digital devices will solve one of the huge problems engineers have been wrestling with for some time now: the data deluge—that is, how to transmit, store, and analyze all the photos and videos being recorded by people and things. (These days, some 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.)

“Humans can extract information from pictures quite easily,” Davies points out. “It’s not so easy for computers.” But, if devices can interpret images to extract meaning from them automatically,…[Read more]