TITAN: Thermal Imaging Technology with Affordable NPUs

TITAN (Thermal Imaging Technology with Affordable NPUs) is proposed as a cost-effective, high-performance, long-wave infrared (LWIR) thermal-image processing module and framework leveraging the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capabilities in recently developed and emerging advanced microcontrollers. TITAN aims to bridge the deployment gap to enable and nurture advanced processing algorithms within size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constrained LWIR camera systems. Although NPUs are typically considered in regard to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) applications which are driving their rapid development, they are also extremely well-suited for many of the calculations used in LWIR image processing.  NPUs are driven by much larger markets than LWIR cameras and exploiting NPU-enabled microcontrollers will allow advanced image processing algorithms that would otherwise be unobtainable in any other SWaP-C comparable system built on another currently available technology.