At the China Security Expo, Huawei Shanghai HiSilicon showcased the Yueying AI ISP chip, a new generation of intelligent image processing engine for IoT smart terminals, and the latest technologies and solutions to the industry. According to the official introduction, HiSilicon Yueying is a new generation of image processing engine (ISP) that introduces AI, which realizes the deep integration of image quality technology and AI technology, and represents a new direction of industry technology. In the dark room experience zone where “the five fingers can’t be seen”, one of Yueying’s key capabilities, super-sensitivity noise reduction, uses neural network deep learning to achieve intelligent noise reduction in low-light scenes, and the picture quality and clarity are industry-leading. Multi-spectral fusion technology is also used to effectively fuse visible light and infrared spectra, so that low-light images can achieve a balance of color and detail, and reshape the colorful visual world. HiSilicon’s intelligent analysis engine is composed of NPU and VPU. The two are deeply integrated and have complementary advantages to efficiently enable end-to-end AI solutions.

ISP is the first step of image processing on the raw data input by the image sensor, covering dozens of image signal processing algorithms. In order to adapt to a variety of different lenses and sensors, hundreds of parameters need to be optimized and adjusted to ensure that the ISP has both versatility and flexibility.

At the same time, the algorithms of many modules in ISP influence each other, and the coordination of algorithms requires a lot of debugging work, which is extremely complicated and challenging.

In the face of increasing scene complexity, it is more and more difficult to obtain significant improvement in image quality under dark light, wide dynamic and other scenes based on traditional image processing technologies such as filtering. Moreover, as the parameter library becomes larger, debugging becomes more difficult. The development cycle is gradually lengthening, and the rate of return on investment for image quality improvement is getting lower and lower.

In recent years, the use of AI for image enhancement has gradually become a new hot spot in the industry, and significant progress has been made. In particular, the use of AI to optimize still photos has been widely used in high-end mobile phone cameras to take pictures with good results.

Shanghai HiSilicon uses its accumulation and experience in traditional ISP image quality technology, as well as its advantages in end-side AI architecture and optimization, to create a new generation of intelligent image processing engine-Yueying AI ISP, which combines traditional image quality optimization experience with The deep integration of AI technology has achieved a leap in five aspects compared with the previous generation flagship ISP of HiSilicon.