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Chinese team develops intelligent vision sensor that turns light signals into AI-ready tokens, reducing use of energy_我的网站

A | LONDON -- The "specter of death" is hanging over Gaza amid an impasse over humanitarian access into the blockaded strip and Israel's "total siege" of Gaza, which has cut off the supply of water, food and fuel, U.N. Emergency Relief chief Martin Griffiths warned.Humanitarian aid and relief convoys carrying "hundreds of tonnes" of essential items have been streaming towards Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, his organization said. Many have parked outside Gaza awaiting access to the besieged enclave as pressure mounts for establishment of a humanitarian corridor that would enable the urgent delivery of aid."Aid access is our overwhelming priority," Griffiths said. "And we are in deep discussions hourly with the Israelis, with the Egyptians, with the Gazans about how to do that."Speaking Tuesday ahead of President Joe Biden's expected Wednesday trip to the region, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it is "critical" that aid begins flowing into Gaza.He announced that the United States and Israel have "agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza."However, Egyptian authorities have said that Israel is not cooperating with delivery of aid into Gaza, with Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry telling reporters that talks are yet to be fruitful, rendering the Rafah crossing -- the sole remaining official exit out of Gaza -- out of use."Until now the Israeli government has not taken a position on opening the Rafah crossing from the Gaza side to allow the entrance of assistance and exit of citizens of third countries," said Shoukry.At least four Israeli airstrikes have been recorded near the Rafah border crossing since the war began.Medical Aid for Palestinians told ABC News that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is deepening, with local health services "overwhelmed.""For more than 16 years, Gaza has been suffering from an illegal blockade weakening it day by day. Medicines and drugs, before this escalation, were at 48% and 29% shortages. Health staff have always been overwhelmed and never paid enough, and lack of specialists was always an issue," said Mahmoud Shalabi, Senior Programmes Manager for Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza. "Now, the situation is even worse, and worse than any other escalation that Gaza has gone through"As the conflict enters day 11, at least 4,178 lives have been lost, including at least 1,400 killed in Israel and at least 2,778 in Gaza, according to the Israeli Health Ministry and the Palestinian Health Ministry."One healthcare worker described to me the situation at Gaza's largest emergency department as a slaughterhouse with bodies on the ground and no space to deal with huge influx of injuries," said Shalabi."Right now, Gaza needs medicines, medical disposables, and equipment. In addition, health staff and humanitarians need safe corridors to reach people and conduct their work safely without being targeted. The IDPs need shelter, food, health, psychosocial services, water, and the list goes on," said Shalabi."We hope that we will come out of this alive."Food and water supplies are also dwindling, aid organizations warning there are just "days" of stocks left for Gazans: "There is not one drop of water, not one grain of wheat, not a liter of fuel that has been allowed into the Gaza Strip for the last eight days," said Philippe Lazzarini, chief of U.N. Aid for Palestinians.The World Health Organization has said it is "advocating vigorously for the opening of Rafah crossing.""Not just one-time access but sustained, unhindered access to Gaza," said WHO's Regional Emergency Director Dr. Richard Brennan.The organisation has raised concerns over potential disease outbreaks with at least 400,000 internally displaced persons seeking shelters in UNRWA schools. Overcrowding, lack of clean water and sanitation could lead to the spread of infections like cholera and dysentery, compounding on the plight of Gazans.Biden is on Wednesday due to head to Israel and Jordan, expected to discuss "humanitarian needs of civilians in Gaza" with Jordan's King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas."The siege in Gaza, the way it is imposed, is nothing else than collective punishment," said Lazzarini. "So, before it is too late, the siege must be lifted and aid agencies must be able to safely bring in essential supplies such as fuel, water, food and medicine."。

The new ultra-low-power intelligent vision sensor chip "LightTok" developed by a research team from Nanjing University. Photo: from Science and Technology Daily
A Chinese research team from Nanjing University has developed a new ultra-low-power intelligent vision sensor chip, dubbed "LightTok," that can convert light signals into tokens within the sensor, significantly reducing the high energy consumption caused by frequent transfers of massive amounts of redundant data, the principal investigator told the Global Times.
According to a release from the Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence of Nanjing University, tokens generated by the LightTok chip can be directly fed into a Transformer encoder for image recognition.
"Our design idea was to move token generation onto the sensor itself, allowing the chip to directly produce tokens that AI models can process once light reaches the sensor," Miao Feng, director of the Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence at Nanjing University, told the Global Times on Thursday. "These tokens contain complete image information."
Physical AI refers to intelligent systems capable of autonomously perceiving, reasoning, acting and receiving feedback in the real world, representing a key pathway for AI to move from the digital realm into the physical world. Vision-based physical AI systems powered by large AI models need to convert visual information from real-world environments into tokens that can be processed by AI models before feeding these tokens into Transformers for subsequent tasks.
In traditional visual perception pipelines, light signals must go through multiple stages, including image sensing, analog-to-digital conversion, data buffering and transfer, digital image patching and embedding, before being transformed into tokens that AI models can process. The frequent transfer of massive amounts of redundant data has resulted in high energy consumption at the edge, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.
The LightTok chip directly addresses a key challenge in physical AI hardware: how to efficiently acquire and tokenize visual information from the physical world with low energy consumption, Miao said.
The LightTok chip consists of a photosensitive memory array and peripheral circuits. The team built the array based on single-layer molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) floating-gate phototransistors, with each pixel capable of sensing light, storing information and performing analog computing. By processing optical information directly within the chip, the device can convert captured visual signals into tokens for AI models, according to the research team.
The current LightTok prototype has a resolution of 32×32 pixels, or 1,024 photosensitive pixels, which is still smaller than that of smartphone cameras and industrial imaging systems. However, Miao said the technology is compatible with CMOS manufacturing processes and can be scaled up. With wafer-level growth of molybdenum disulfide materials, the chip could potentially achieve a scale comparable to existing imaging devices.
Miao said the chip also draws inspiration from the information-processing mechanism of human vision. Similar to how the retina extracts key visual information before transmitting it to the brain, the chip also aims to process visual information at an early stage.
The research was conducted in collaboration with another research team from the National University of Singapore. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature Sensors, an internationally renowned journal in the field of sensing technology, according to the release.
Potential applications for LightTok include drone systems, autonomous remote sensing and small-scale embodied AI systems, Miao said. In these scenarios, devices need to continuously detect, understand and track targets, generating massive amounts of visual data. By reducing the energy required for visual processing, the technology could extend the operating time of drones, satellites and small robots with limited power supplies, the expert said.
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