[drdaeman]

Hmm... does it really work as advertised? Can it really run some basic object detection in real-time on-device, and at what resolution/framerate combination(s)?

Sorry for being skeptical, just that it sounds too incredible to believe. I've toyed around with the same chips you're using, OV2640 with ESP32-S3 and at any decent resolution it simply seemed to lack the processing power to run even simple motion detection, let alone anything fancier. Surely it was kind of fine at low-res and it kinda works spotting an elephant in a room, but it was completely incapable for detecting small fast-moving targets (roaches) under less than perfect lighting conditions (bathroom ceiling lights, decent but not overly bright). Best it could do was serving a 1024p@5fps MJPEG stream over a network to a more powerful machine for further processing.

[ge96]

Here's a video of a guy squeezing an ML model into a Teensy granted the Teensy is pretty powerful

https://youtu.be/6raRftH9yxM?t=436

edit: I will say processing IMU data is probably (a lot) easier than frame by frame of some video

[daveloyall]

I'm skeptical, too. But apparently OP isn't the only one using (or trying to use) "TensorFlow-Lite for Microcontrollers" on an ESP32-S3. See this (little bit of) chatter: https://github.com/tensorflow/tflite-micro/search?q=esp32&ty...

[drdaeman]

I haven't tried but it must be doable at low-res low-framerate conditions, where CPUs still have plenty of time left between the frames and frames aren't big (so maybe it can even fully decode those JPEGs, not just extract the DC coefficients for a quick-and-dirty hacks).

It's just the advertising page that sounds kinda unbelievable: low power, night vision, image analysis on the device, perfect for wildlife monitoring, can detect pests on crops (implying high resolution unless we're talking about deer and rabbits lol), etc etc.

[conductr]

The video on the site really should highlight some of the capabilities. It was pretty pointless in “showing off” what it could do, which is typically what video is good for.

[steve_adams_86]

I’m able to do it with a less powerful chip, albeit low resolution and grayscale.

I’m hoping to make a pest detector for my automated hydroponic garden. It seems very tractable at this point.

[nl]

TFLite is designed for this:

> It has been tested extensively with many processors based on the Arm Cortex-M Series architecture, and has been ported to other architectures including ESP32.

https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/microcontrollers

Additionally there is an optimized kernel for ESP32: https://github.com/espressif/tflite-micro-esp-examples

Edit: personally, I like the Sipeed MAIX for this application, although the software was pretty annoying when I used it (in 2020).