EDGE3 Technologies Honda RD Americas awarded patent for HMI system combining gesture and voice recognition

2 December 2014

EDGE3 Technologies, an advanced vision analytics company, and Honda RD Americas have been awarded US patent number 8,744,645 for their jointly developed in-vehicle human machine interface (HMI) system which combines voice and gesture recognition. The core technology, an integrated vision analytics system developed by EDGE3, is a result of years of collaboration between EDGE3 and Honda RD which up until now has been kept confidential by both organizations.

<!——>

The HMI system will allow drivers more accurately and naturally to control their automobile’s infotainment and climate systems. By providing a secondary command input, the system differentiates between intended and unintentional commands while eliminating many of the problems which have plagued traditional voice command systems, such as false positives.

The project incorporates one of the most advanced computational stereo cameras for 3D machine vision together with an advanced artificial intelligence platform into a fully integrated and embeddable system which runs on a standard system on a chip (SoC).

From the onset, one of the goals of the collaboration was to leverage existing off the shelf sensors, chips and hardware to construct a world class, automotive grade HMI system.

This system is a definite game-changer for the global automotive and machine vision industry because it fundamentally modernizes how automobiles can respond to human behavior. Until now, machine vision was limited to use cases where the environment was extremely controlled and the computational requirements were unlimited. With this patented technology and other technology, we can bring sophisticated vision analytics to any platform, regardless of lighting conditions and environmental variability. We are honored to work on this project with Honda RD, which for years has been a visionary organization with respect to the introduction of new automotive technologies.