Security News > 2021 > July > DARPA nails cash to project 'FENCE' — a smart camera that only sends pics when pixels change
The USA's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced it will fund development of a new type of "Event-based" camera that only transmits information about pixels that have changed.
The Agency last week announced last week that Raytheon, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman will develop the new snapper under the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics program.
The research and development agency solicited proposals for the project in October 2020, when it sought help to build a camera that can sense motion and determine its importance, with low latency and consuming minimal energy.
The improvement is attributable to the neuromorphic camera's asynchronous operation and the transmission of data only on pixels that have changed - detected by the thermal detector in the IR camera known as the focal plane array and machine learning algorithms.
DARPA said Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman will work to develop the low-latency asynchronous read-out integrated circuit and a ROIC-integrated processing layer that identifies relevant change signals.
For FETT, DARPA's first ever bug bounty program, the organization provided hundreds of researchers and engineers access to a virtual platform to search for vulnerabilities and security flaws - known as the System Security Integration Through Hardware and firmware program.