On September 24, 2026 at 9 am PT (noon ET), Petronel Bigioi, CEO at FotoNation, will present the free hour webinar “Always-On Edge Perception Via a Heterogeneous Near-Memory AI Architecture,” organized by the Edge AI and Vision Alliance. Here’s the description, from the event registration page:
Always-on perception is becoming a defining capability of next-generation edge devices, from AR glasses and hearables to battery-operated sensors. Yet continuous audio/video and motion understanding runs into two hard limits: energy per inference and memory bandwidth. We’ll present FotoNation’s heterogeneous, near-memory edge AI architecture for always-on processing, combining a low-power on-device engine (ODE), an ISP-Lite front end and region of interest (ROI) adaptive compute. The pipeline stays active while dynamically scaling precision and workload to the scene, delivering responsive perception within milliwatt-class power envelopes. The ISP-Lite provides lightweight, task-aware preconditioning to reduce downstream compute without sacrificing semantic quality, while the ODE performs energy-proportional feature extraction for motion vectors, micro-events and audiovisual triggers. These cues drive a multistage ROI scheduler that invokes neural ISP and specialized models only where needed. Near-memory compute couples local memory with AI accelerators to minimize off-chip transfers, enabling continuous sensing with deterministic latency.
Petronel Bigioi is FotoNation’s CEO. Based in Ireland, he is responsible for leading the company’s vision toward edge AI signal processing solutions for the home, automotive and mobile markets. Petronel has more than 250 granted and published patents to date. He is an IEEE Fellow with more than 25 years of experience in the camera and mobile phone industries, working in both signal processing and connectivity. His work has been recognized by the Romanian Academy’s Gheorghe Cartianu Award. A co-founder of several successful companies, including FotoNation (acquired in 2008 by Xperi and relaunched in 2024), he is a pioneer of digital camera connectivity and a co-author of PTP and PTP-over-IP communication standards. Petronel obtained his PhD in Electronics, a master’s degree in ASIC Design and a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Transilvania University of Brasov. Petronel also holds a master’s degree in Networks and Communications from the University of Galway.
To register for this free webinar, please see the event page. For more information, please email [email protected].
