Last month, we announced that Coral graduated out of beta, into a wider, global release. Today, we're announcing the next version of Mendel Linux (4.0 release Day) for the Coral Dev Board and SoM, as well as a number of other exciting updates.

We have made significant updates to improve performance and stability. Mendel Linux 4.0 release Day is based on Debian 10 Buster and includes upgraded GStreamer pipelines and support for Python 3.7, OpenCV, and OpenCL. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 4.14 and U-Boot to version 2017.03.3.

We’ve also made it possible to use the Dev Board's GPU to convert YUV to RGB pixel data at up to 130 frames per second on 1080p resolution, which is one to two orders of magnitude faster than on Mendel Linux 3.0 release Chef. These changes make it possible to run inferences with YUV-producing sources such as cameras and hardware video decoders.

To upgrade your Dev Board or SoM, follow our guide to flash a new system image.

MediaPipe on Coral

MediaPipe is an open-source, cross-platform framework for building multi-modal machine learning perception pipelines that can process streaming data like video and audio. For example, you can use MediaPipe to run on-device machine learning models and process video from a camera to detect, track and visualize hand landmarks in real-time.

Developers and researchers can prototype their real-time perception use cases starting with the creation of the MediaPipe graph on desktop. Then they can quickly convert and deploy that same graph to the Coral Dev Board, where the quantized TensorFlow Lite model will be accelerated by the Edge TPU.

As part of this first release, MediaPipe is making available new experimental samples for both object and face detection, with support for the Coral Dev Board and SoM. The source code and instructions for compiling and running each sample are available on GitHub and on the MediaPipe documentation site.

New Teachable Sorter project tutorial

A new Teachable Sorter tutorial is now available. The Teachable Sorter is a physical sorting machine that combines the Coral USB Accelerator's ability to perform very low latency inference with an ML model that can be trained to rapidly recognize and sort different objects as they fall through the air. It leverages Google’s new Teachable Machine 2.0, a web application that makes it easy for anyone to quickly train a model in a fun, hands-on way.

The tutorial walks through how to build the free-fall sorter, which separates marshmallows from cereal and can be trained using Teachable Machine.

Coral is now on TensorFlow Hub

Earlier this month, the TensorFlow team announced a new version of TensorFlow Hub, a central repository of pre-trained models. With this update, the interface has been improved with a fresh landing page and search experience. Pre-trained Coral models compiled for the Edge TPU continue to be available on our Coral site, but a select few are also now available from the TensorFlow Hub. On the site, you can find models featuring an Overlay interface, allowing you to test the model's performance against a custom set of images right from the browser. Check out the experience for MobileNet v1 and MobileNet v2.

We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we continue to evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the new Coral partnerships page. We hope you’ll use the new features offered on Coral.ai as a resource and encourage you to keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

Last March, we launched Coral beta from Google Research. Coral helps engineers and researchers bring new models out of the data center and onto devices, running TensorFlow models efficiently at the edge. Coral is also at the core of new applications of local AI in industries ranging from agriculture to healthcare to manufacturing. We've received a lot of feedback over the past six months and used it to improve our platform. Today we’re thrilled to graduate Coral out of beta, into a wider, global release.

Coral is already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge.

In healthcare, Care.ai is using Coral to build a device that enables hospitals and care centers to respond quickly to falls, prevent bed sores, improve patient care, and reduce costs. Virgo SVS is also using Coral as the basis of a polyp detection system that helps doctors improve the accuracy of endoscopies.

In a very different use case, Olea Edge employs Coral to help municipal water utilities accurately measure the amount of water used by their commercial customers. Their Meter Health Analytics solution uses local AI to reduce waste and predict equipment failure in industrial water meters.

Nexcom is using Coral to build gateways with local AI and provide a platform for next-gen, AI-enabled IoT applications. By moving AI processing to the gateway, existing sensor networks can stay in service without the need to add AI processing to each node.

From prototype to production

Coral’s Dev Board is designed as an integrated prototyping solution for new product development. Under the heatsink is the detachable Coral SoM, which combines Google’s Edge TPU with the NXP IMX8M SoC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, memory, and storage. We’re happy to announce that you can now purchase the Coral SoM standalone. We’ve also created a baseboard developer guide to help integrate it into your own production design.

Our Coral USB Accelerator allows users with existing system designs to add local AI inferencing via USB 2/3. For production workloads, we now offer three new Accelerators that feature the Edge TPU and connect via PCIe interfaces: Mini PCIe, M.2 A+E key, and M.2 B+M key. You can easily integrate these Accelerators into new products or upgrade existing devices that have an available PCIe slot.

The new Coral products are available globally and for sale at Mouser; for large volume sales, contact our sales team. By the end of 2019, we'll continue to expand our distribution of the Coral Dev Board and SoM into new markets including: Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Ghana and the Philippines.

Better resources

We’ve also revamped the Coral site with better organization for our docs and tools, a set of success stories, and industry focused pages. All of it can be found at a new, easier to remember URL Coral.ai.

To help you get the most out of the hardware, we’re also publishing a new set of examples. The included models and code can provide solutions to the most common on-device ML problems, such as image classification, object detection, pose estimation, and keyword spotting.

For those looking for a more in-depth application—and a way to solve the eternal problem of squirrels plundering your bird feeder—the Smart Bird Feeder project shows you how to perform classification with a custom dataset on the Coral Dev board.

Finally, we’ll soon release a new version of the Mendel OS that updates the system to Debian Buster, and we're hard at work on more improvements to the Edge TPU compiler and runtime that will improve the model development workflow.

The official launch of Coral is, of course, just the beginning, and we’ll continue to evolve the platform. Please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

Coral’s had a busy summer working with customers, expanding distribution, and building new features — and of course taking some time for R&R. We’re excited to share updates, early work, and new models for our platform for local AI with you.

The compiler has been updated to version 2.0, adding support for models built using post-training quantization—only when using full integer quantization (previously, we required quantization-aware training)—and fixing a few bugs. As the Tensorflow team mentions in their Medium post “post-training integer quantization enables users to take an already-trained floating-point model and fully quantize it to only use 8-bit signed integers (i.e. `int8`).” In addition to reducing the model size, models that are quantized with this method can now be accelerated by the Edge TPU found in Coral products.

We've also updated the Edge TPU Python library to version 2.11.1 to include new APIs for transfer learning on Coral products. The new on-device back propagation API allows you to perform transfer learning on the last layer of an image classification model. The last layer of a model is removed before compilation and implemented on-device to run on the CPU. It allows for near-real time transfer learning and doesn’t require you to recompile the model. Our previously released imprinting API, has been updated to allow you to quickly retrain existing classes or add new ones while leaving other classes alone. You can now even keep the classes from the pre-trained base model. Learn more about both options for on-device transfer learning.

Until now, accelerating your model with the Edge TPU required that you write code using either our Edge TPU Python API or in C++. But now you can accelerate your model on the Edge TPU when using the TensorFlow Lite interpreter API, because we've released a TensorFlow Lite delegate for the Edge TPU. The TensorFlow Lite Delegate API is an experimental feature in TensorFlow Lite that allows for the TensorFlow Lite interpreter to delegate part or all of graph execution to another executor—in this case, the other executor is the Edge TPU. Learn more about the TensorFlow Lite delegate for Edge TPU.

Coral has also been working with Edge TPU and AutoML teams to release EfficientNet-EdgeTPU: a family of image classification models customized to run efficiently on the Edge TPU. The models are based upon the EfficientNet architecture to achieve the image classification accuracy of a server-side model in a compact size that's optimized for low latency on the Edge TPU. You can read more about the models’ development and performance on the Google AI Blog, and download trained and compiled versions on the Coral Models page.

And, as summer comes to an end we also want to share that Arrow offers a student teacher discount for those looking to experiment with the boards in class or the lab this year.

We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].