Infineon's Smart Alarm System Puts Machine Learning to Bear on Breaking Glass and Other Triggers
Offering a claimed five year runtime on battery alone, this edge AI pops a clever sensor fusion algorithm on a low-power SoC.
Infineon Technologies has launched what it claims to be the "industry's first" artificially intelligent acoustic event and sensor fusion alarm system to be driven wholly by battery power: the Smart Alarm System, or SAS.
"We are excited to enable a unique and differentiated approach to bringing AI/ML [Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning] capabilities to cost-sensitive, battery-powered home security sensor systems, without sacrificing battery life," says Infineon's Laurent Remont of the launch.
"Current home security solutions are unreliable for detecting events such as glass break[ing]," Remont continues. "Our new solution combines a number of best-in-class technologies to create an alarm system that is smart, reliable and power efficient. We look forward to bringing more innovative solutions into the home security market."
The alarm system is built around Infineon's PSoC 62 "Performance Line" system-on-chip, which offers two Arm Cortex-M4 cores and an Arm Cortex-M0+ core — enough power to run an on-device machine learning algorithm that can differentiate between alarm-triggering events and the normal sounds of a home or office, yet to do so efficiently enough to allow the system to run entirely on battery for up to five years.
Elsewhere on the board is an XENSIV MEMS microphone and a digital pressure sensor, with data from both being fed into the on-board ML algorithm to avoid false positives triggering the alarm unnecessarily. In addition to triggering on the sound of breaking glass, indicating an intruder has broken a window to gain entry, the alarm system can also send out alerts when less-smart audible devices like smoke or carbon monoxide alarms have triggered.
A reference design incorporating all these features is available to Infineon customers now, with a physical board shipping in September this year. The company has also partnered with Flex to offer the same capabilities in a system-in-package (SIP) format. Additional information is available on the official product page.