This Is How I\’ll Be Using Raspberry Pi\’s New AI Camera
The Raspberry Pi AI Camera brings AI vision to almost any Raspberry Pi model. With its neural processing hardware, the AI Camera does all the heavy work on the device, which means you can now use your Raspberry Pi for more AI projects than ever before.
AR Streaming
I\’ve always wanted to stream on Twitch for laughs, but I\’m a camera-averse person and a bit of a privacy freak. Sure, I could create a 3D model to replace my physical appearance on screen, but I don\’t want my online avatar to be a werewolf or Sonic the Hedgehog – there\’s nothing wrong with that if that\’s what you prefer.
So, is there a happy medium between revealing my full identity and creating a VTuber avatar? With the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, augmented reality (AR) streaming could be the answer I\’ve been looking for.
The Raspberry Pi AI Camera can do semantic segmentation, which is a fancy way of saying it can assign meaning to each pixel of a video stream. Low latency processing can be so powerful that AR filters can be overlayed instantly.
Maybe I\’ll use AR filters to give myself one of those futuristic helmets like the ADVENT officers from XCOM wear. It will cover my eyes and hair but leave the other half of my face and body alone. Then I\’ll decorate my back room so that my real bookshelves look like they\’re part of the bulkhead of a space cruiser.
The Raspberry Pi AI Camera seems like a great way to showcase extended reality applications and their possibilities. Sure, it might take a lot of effort to troll one or two of my viewers, but a man can dream.
DIY Party Photo Booth
What\’s the best way to liven up a party at a gathering of friends or Christmas get-together? You probably guessed alcohol, but I\’ll say a party photo booth.
But renting a photo booth for small gatherings isn\’t very practical. This can get expensive pretty quickly, not to mention the logistics of transporting the equipment in and out. This is where the Raspberry Pi AI Camera comes in.
Since it doesn’t need a GPU or a separate Tensor Processing Unit, the Raspberry Pi AI Camera can do a lot without taking up much space. It’s portable enough that I can set it up in a DIY photo booth whenever I want.
The Pi AI Camera can analyze pose estimation, which means it can understand how people are standing or gesturing. It can automatically suggest adding props like lightsabers or animated hearts around joints based on what it recognizes in the frame.
If someone comes to our New Year’s Eve party and calls my booth super nerdy, I’ll respond that it’s better than taking photos like it’s 1999.
Automated Wildlife Album
While living in the WUI (Wildland-Urban Interface), my partner and I have crossed paths with deer, foxes, and all sorts of beautiful hummingbird species that we can’t name. Instead of trying to identify them using binoculars and obscure Google searches, I think I’ll let the Raspberry Pi AI Camera do the job.
There are already amazing Raspberry Pi AI projects that can be done with the regular Pi, but adding the AI Camera will allow me to easily run neural network models. This ability to incorporate machine learning – including apps using TensorFlow or PyTorch – will take projects using the Raspberry Pi and camera to the next level.