A Beginner's Guide to AI and Edge Computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now part of our daily lives. With companies developing low-cost AI-powered hardware into their products, it is now becoming a reality to purchase AI accelerator hardware at comparatively very low costs. One such hardware accelerator is the Hailo module which is fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5. The Raspberry Pi AI Kit is a cleverly designed hardware as it bundles an M.2-based Hailo-8L accelerator with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ to offer high speed inferencing on the Raspberry Pi 5. Using the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, you can build complex AI-based vision applications, running in real-time, such as object detection, pose estimation, instance segmentation, home automation, security, robotics, and many more neural network-based applications.

This book is an introduction to the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, and it is aimed to provide some help to readers who are new to the kit and wanting to run some simple AI-based visual models on their Raspberry Pi 5 computers. The book is not meant to cover the detailed process of model creation and compilation, which is done on an Ubuntu computer with massive disk space and 32 GB memory. Examples of pre-trained and custom object detection are given in the book.

Two fully tested and working projects are given in the book. The first project explains how a person can be detected and how an LED can be activated after the detection, and how the detection can be acknowledged by pressing an external button. The second project illustrates how a person can be detected, and how this information can be passed to a smart phone over a Wi-Fi link, as well as how the detection can be acknowledged by sending a message from the smartphone to your Raspberry Pi 5.