Orbbec Unveils the Persee N1 Depth-Sensing Camera, Driven by an NVIDIA Jetson Nano

3D vision specialist Orbbec has announced the Persee N1, a depth-sensing smart camera kit with built-in edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) capabilities — courtesy an integrated NVIDIA Jetson Nano computer-on-module (COM).

"The self-contained Persee N1 camera-computer makes it easy for computer vision developers to experiment with 3D vision," claims Orbbec's head of platform and partnerships Amit Banerjee of the company's latest hardware launch. "This combination of our Gemini 2 RGB-D camera and the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics allows AI development while at the same time enabling large-scale cloud-based commercial deployments."

The Persee N1 combines Orbbec's Gemini 2 camera — which boasts a 1920×1080 RGB and 1280×800 depth resolution, both at 30 frames per second — with NVIDIA's Jetson Nano COM, providing a quad-core Arm Cortex-A57 processor running at 1.43GHz and 4GB of RAM plus a 16GB eMMC and M.2 M-key slot for additional storage.

To accelerate on-device computer vision work, the Jetson Nano includes a 128-core Maxwell graphics processor providing up to 512 giga-floating-point-operations per second (gigaflops) of compute at an FP16 precision — to which Orbbec has added its own in-house application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) specifically for processing the depth data from the camera.

Designed as a wholly standalone device, the camera includes its own USB connections with keyboard and mouse support, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, and a gigabit EThernet pot with Power over Ethernet (PoE) support. As with all Jetson devices, the operating system is NVIDIA's respin of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux — and Orbbec provides its own software development kit (SDK) on top.

"The Persee N1 features robust support for the industry-standard computer vision and AI toolset from OpenCV," adds Dr. Satya Mullick, PhD, chief executive officer of computer vision specialist OpenCV. "OpenCV and Orbbec have entered a partnership to ensure OpenCV compatibility with Orbbec's powerful new devices and are jointly developing new capabilities for the 3D vision community."

More information on the camera is available on the Orbbec website, with orders open at $499 — and with discounts available for volume purchases, the company promises.