Dr Chenglu Wang (left in picture) has been with Huawei for over four years and has overseen the integration of AI with the company’s products.

HiAI is Huawei’s mobile AI open platform which consists of three layers:

• Application – Focuses on enabling AI for apps to make them more intelligent and powerful.
• Chip – Aims to achieve optimal performance with heterogeneous scheduling and NPU acceleration.
• Service – Represents the company’s cloud-based services.

Together, they offer the following capabilities:

• Computer Vision (CV) Engine – CV is the capabilities by which computers simulate the human visual system to sense the ambient environment, and determine, recognise, and understand the composition of space. The capabilities include image super-resolution, facial recognition, and object recognition.
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Engine – ASR converts human voice into text, to facilitate further parsing and understanding by computers. The capabilities include speech recognition, speech conversion, and text-to-speech (TTS).
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Engine – NLU is combined with the ASR engine, to enable apps to understand human voice or text, thereby performing communication or natural actions. The capabilities include word segmentation, text entity recognition, emotive tendency analysis, and machine translation.

According to Wang, the adoption of the HiAI platform is meeting Huawei’s expectations. However, some features – such as ASR and NLU – are still locked to China.

When asked when more of HiAI’s features will expand to other regions, Wang responded:

“Huawei’s consumer cloud is not so popular globally. However, this year we will launch some consumer services in Europe so maybe we can see more deployed globally… maybe we can get some alignment with China.”

Last year, we saw Huawei debut the world’s first smartphone AI chipset – the Kirin 970 – in the Mate 10. The AI chip provided things such as limited automatic camera scene selection, improved background noise reduction in calls, and pixel quality enhancement when taking pictures of documents.

Huawei’s next flagship, the P20 Pro, improved on the automatic camera scene selection to recognise 500+ scenarios across 19 categories. The company also introduced AIS (AI Image Stabilisation) which uses machine learning algorithms to predict and counteract shaky movements on a frame-by-frame basis.

This year, with the Mate 20, Huawei has debuted the Kirin 980 which boasts the world’s first dual-NPU (Neural Processing Unit). Huawei claims it offers an incredible 226 percent improvement over its predecessor.

Our first question to Wang was if the Kirin 980’s extra performance has allowed Huawei to do anything it couldn’t with the 970. Wang couldn’t provide any examples and even said: “It’s almost the same”.

When asked if that means Mate 20’s AI features will be coming to last year’s model, Wang said they will be.

However, a slide provided by the company provides more detail about the benefits of switching from a single NPU to a dual:

As mentioned in our video review of the Mate 20 Pro’s AI features at the bottom of this article, and confirmed by the above slide, real-time video processing takes a lot of power. It will be interesting to see how the Kirin 970 handles things such as the real-time AI colour video effect if it’s truly coming to Kirin 970 devices.

In recent weeks, Huawei pushed an update which switched off the ‘Master AI’ automatic camera scene recognition feature that debuted in the Mate 10. The feature can be re-enabled in the settings but is now off by default.

Master AI was a focal point of both the Mate 10 and P20 launches and we always felt it served as a great example of how AI can make life simpler. The feature provided better results when taking a picture unless the individual has time, and know-how, to manually change settings on a scene-by-scene basis.

When asked why Huawei took the decision to switch off such a prominent feature, Wang responded:

“Master AI is Huawei’s first try to use an AI-enabled camera. After we launched this functionality, they don’t like the phone… so we’re changing strategy. We give the basic capability and give this feature as an option, not just automatically.”

The explanation makes some amount of sense. As a techie, it can sometimes be difficult to put yourself in the view of a standard consumer. The average person, however, often just wants a phone with a camera that works as they expect.

Back in April, Huawei VP of Software Engineering Felix Zhang said the company wants to introduce the first digital assistant with ‘emotional interactions’.

Many industry leaders are working towards such a landmark moment but Zhang provided no timeline as to when Huawei expects to launch its own. We asked Wang when he expects such a digital assistant to become available.

“From a software view, it’s still a very big gap,” he said. “Maybe two or three years if the industry can work together.”

You can find our video showing the Mate 20’s AI features below:

 AI & >

The post Huawei discusses AI strategy with us at the Mate 20 launch appeared first on AI News.

Last year, we covered the impressive AI-powered capabilities of the Mate 10 Pro. This year, the company is starting to really take advantage of its dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit).

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the features, it’s worth taking a second to appreciate the effort Huawei puts into developing its technologies. In fact, Huawei now spends €10.4 billion each year on R&D to rank it sixth place globally. For perspective, this is even ahead of Apple.

It’s clear the company’s R&D is resulting in real-world performance. Compared against the AI processing capabilities of market-leading chips from Qualcomm and Apple, the Kirin processor developed by Huawei beats them across a range of benchmarks.

We all know benchmarks are one thing, but it’s what the performance offers to end users which matters.

Last year, Huawei introduced what it called the ‘First Generation AI Camera’ in the Mate 10. We were impressed with the speed in which the AI could detect scenes and objects to optimise the camera for the best shots, but the number it could recognise was limited.

Huawei is building on last year’s functionality to offer what it’s calling ‘Pro Skills with Master AI’ to its users. The company aims to offer the capabilities of a dedicated camera with the simplicity expected from a smartphone.

As of writing, it certainly appears to have succeeded. The P20 now tops the DxOMark rankings which are often seen as the closest to an industry standard. This feat was achieved through a combination of innovative hardware and, of course, artificial intelligence.

The onboard AI can now recognise 500+ scenarios across 19 categories. While impressive, you’d be right to say the scene detection is an expected iterative upgrade over last year’s innovation. However, that’s not all Huawei had for us today.

Electronic image stabilisation (EIS) was the first of its kind to come to smartphones. Later, manufacturers took inspiration from high-end dedicated cameras and began to use optical image stabilisation (OIS) which suspends the lens itself to absorb sudden movements. Huawei is now looking to make the next leap with, you probably guessed it, AI image stabilisation (AIS).

The results are pretty spectacular. The AI is really a (serious) advancement of EIS, with the NPU using machine learning algorithms to predict and counteract shaky movements on a frame-by-frame basis.

DxOMark is once again impressed. Ranking the video recording side of the P20 Pro alone, the company gave a score of 98 to set yet another record.

Huawei’s AIS is also used for still photographs to an impressive degree. Anyone with some knowledge of photography will know that in order to get decent night shots you will often find yourself needing to hold a camera very still to allow enough light into the sensor. In the past, especially with smartphones, this required a tripod. Now Huawei claims its AIS is eliminating the need for most scenarios.

A photo taken by Huawei CEO Richard Yu was shown to the audience. At first, it seemed disappointing compared to other shots we’d seen throughout his presentation. Yu then revealed the buildings in the background of his photo were unable to be seen by his own eye yet clearly visible in the photo. Along with the AIS, this would have been aided by the camera’s maximum ISO sensitivity of 102400 (the same as a Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR.) For comparison, the iPhone X’s maximum is 6400.

Motion photography can be notoriously difficult and it often leaves users with blurry photos during the most critical moments. A feature Huawei is calling ‘4D Predictive Focus’ uses AI to keep track of objects in motion and where they’re heading to predict where it needs to focus next for the best shots. We had a brief chance to test out the feature on a person on a swing and the shot was in full focus in contrast to even our Mate 10 Pro despite that device also having a well-respected camera setup.

While this sums up the significant advancements Huawei has made in photography through AI, it’s not all it’s been doing in the field. We had a chance to sit down and interview the company’s director of AI product management and we’ll be posting our insights from that conversation in the coming days.

Are you impressed with Huawei’s use of AI for photography?

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