Himax Technologies, Inc. announced a collaboration with E Ink Holdings Inc. to introduce a revolutionary ultralow power battery-operated smart retail solution at the upcoming 2024 Touch Taiwan. The solution incorporates Himax's leading-edge WiseEye? ultralow power AI sensing technology with E Ink's signage EPD ("Electronic Paper Display"), featuring E Ink's Kaleido display, and ESL ("Electronic Shelf Label").

Leveraging WiseEye, the smart retail solution deploys context-aware AI in human presence and shopper insight detection while also significantly enhancing the already impressive battery life of an ePaper display and enabling real-time personalized marketing. Himax WiseEye ultralow power AI sensing Technology incorporates Himax proprietary ultralow power AI processor, always-on CMOS image sensor, and CNN-based AI algorithm, offering ultralow power, always-on sensing, on-device context-aware AI and has been widely deployed in consumer electronics and AIoT related applications. In an era where personal data privacy is paramount, WiseEye AI ensures the security of sensitive personal data by conducting AI inferences locally on the endpoint devices.

This approach guarantees that no raw images are transmitted outside the device. Instead, only AI-enabled personalized metadata is delivered in genome-level size to the store management system on the cloud. This greatly reduces latency, minimizes power consumption, and ultimately offers users maximum privacy protection for their information.

For individual detection, the WiseEye-equipped in-store e-signage discerns a viewer's individual characteristics, such as gender expression, appearance, and age, and displays an individual-correlated and/or personalized advertisement and recommendation of near-by merchants along with relevant product details such as shelf location and manufacturer brands. This creates a real-time enhancement of the shopping experience for customers. Most notably, WiseEye achieves these AI advancements while consuming mere milliwatts of power.

When combined with its significant power-saving feature, this results in an extensive battery life for smart e-signage systems.