Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Movimento, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Texas Instruments, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have joined Automotive Grade Linux. Additionally, it was announced that Movimento, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have also joined The Linux Foundation.

“AGL has seen tremendous growth over the past year as demand for connected car technology and infotainment are rapidly increasing,” said Dan Cauchy, General Manager of Automotive at The Linux Foundation. “Our membership base is not only growing rapidly, but it is also diversifying across various business interests, from semiconductors and in-vehicle software to IoT and connected cloud services. This is a clear indication that the connected car revolution has broad implications across many industry verticals.”

Automotive Grade Linux recently hosted its All Member Meeting in Tokyo, Japan. The meeting brought together engineers, developers and business leaders from 39 member companies to share information, collaborate further on AGL open source technology and expand the ecosystem.

Earlier this year at CES 2016, AGL announced a new AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) distribution built specifically for the automotive industry. This new Linux distribution is built from the ground up to address automotive specific applications and is in a unique position to become the de facto standard for the industry. Ideal for deploying navigation, communications, safety, security and infotainment functionality, the AGL UCB distribution is supported by a broad community of participants from the automotive, communications and semiconductor industries, as well as individual developers.

“Embracing open source and working with Automotive Grade Linux will help us further expand our solutions for automotive which are widely adopted in production and next generation automotive Instrument Cluster, ADAS and Infotainment platforms,” said Wei-Jin Dai, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intellectual Property Division, and Chief Strategy Officer at VeriSilicon Holdings. “We applaud the momentum the AGL community has generated by bringing together the leading automotive OEMs and the supply chain to develop automotive solutions that improve functional safety, enhance security, shorten product development cycles and enhance quality across the automotive supply chain.”

About Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)

Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for the connected car. Leveraging the power and strength of Linux at its core, AGL is uniting automakers and technology companies to develop a common platform that offers OEMs complete control of the user experience so the industry can rapidly innovate where it counts. The AGL platform is available to all, and anyone can participate in its development. Learn more: https://www.automotivelinux.org/.

Automotive Grade Linux is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at  www.linuxfoundation.org.

Additional Resources

• Developer Resources
• About the AGL Community
• Participating in Automotive Grade Linux

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announced the immediate availability of the OpenVX™ 1.1 specification for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications and libraries. OpenVX enables performance and power optimized computer vision algorithms for use cases such as face, body and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. Conformant OpenVX 1.0 implementations and tools are shipping from AMD, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Synopsis and VeriSilicon. OpenVX 1.1 builds on this momentum by adding new processing functions for use cases such as computational photography, and enhances application control over how data is accessed and processed. An open source OpenVX 1.1 sample implementation and full conformance tests will be available in the first half of 2016. Details on the OpenVX specifications and Adopters Program are available at: www.khronos.org/openvx.

“More and more products are incorporating computer vision, and OpenVX addresses a critical need by making it easier for developers to harness heterogeneous processors for high performance, low power vision processing – without having to become processor experts,” said Jeff Bier, founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance. “This is essential for enabling the widespread deployment of visual intelligence in devices and applications.”

The precisely defined specification and conformance tests for OpenVX make it ideal for deployment in production systems where cross-vendor consistency and reliability are essential. Additionally, OpenVX is easily extensible to enable nodes to be deployed to meet customer needs, ahead of being integrated into the core specification.

The new OpenVX 1.1 specification is a significant expansion in the breadth and flexibility of vision processing functionality and the OpenVX graph framework:

• Definition and processing of Laplacian pyramids to support computational photography use cases;
• Median, erode and dilate image filters, including custom patterns;
• Easier and less error prone methods to read and write data to and from OpenVX objects;
• Targets – to control on which accelerator to run nodes in a heterogeneous device;
• More convenient and flexible API for extending OpenVX with user kernels;
• Many other improvements and clarifications to infrastructure functions and vision nodes.

“This is an important milestone towards widespread adoption of OpenVX in embedded platforms running computer vision algorithms,” said Victor Erukhimov, President, Itseez and chair of the OpenVX working group. “The new vision functions that we added enable exciting use cases, and refined infrastructure API gives developers more flexibility for creating advanced computer vision applications.”

About OpenVX

OpenVX abstracts a vision processing execution and memory model at a much higher level than general compute frameworks such as OpenCL, enabling significant implementation innovation and efficient execution on a wide range of architectures while maintaining performance portability and a consistent vision acceleration API for application development. An OpenVX developer expresses a connected graph of vision nodes that an implementer can execute and optimize through a wide variety of techniques such as: acceleration on CPUs, GPUs, DSPs or dedicated hardware, compiler optimizations, node coalescing, and tiled execution to keep sections of processed images in local memories. This architectural agility enables OpenVX applications on a diversity of systems optimized for different levels of power and performance, including very battery-sensitive, vision-enabled, wearable displays.

Future Safety Critical Standards

Vision processing will be a vital component of many emerging safety critical market opportunities including Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles and medical and process control applications. The OpenVX working group is developing OpenVX SC, a safety critical version of OpenVX for to address the unique and stringent requirements of these high reliability markets. The Safety Critical working group at Khronos is building on the experience of shipping the OpenGL® SC 2.0 specification for high reliability use of modern graphics programmable shader engines, and is developing cross-API guidelines to aid in the development of open technology standards for safety critical systems. Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in these development processes.

Vivante Support for OpenVX 1.1

“As an early adopter of the OpenVX standard, VeriSilicon congratulates the Khronos Group on reaching this major milestone,” said Shanghung Lin, vice president for Vision Image Products at VeriSilicon. “Our customers have enthusiastically embraced OpenVX conformant solutions in our VIP (Vision Image Processor) line that being designed into silicon products for automotive, video surveillance and other IoT applications. OpenVX has been accelerating mass-market adoption of computer vision applications such as natural user interfaces, always-on cameras, and Automotive Driver Assistance Systems, and OpenVX 1.1 makes a significant step toward more flexible support for vision processing and computational photography. We are proud to support the OpenVX standard with our VIP, with a power/performance/area optimized architecture for novel vision processing use cases on mobile, home, automotive, and embedded platforms.”

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, SPIR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, EGL™, COLLADA™, and glTF™. All Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.