Hawxeye, a US-based object recognition technology spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), was acquired by autonomous service robot producer Bossa Nova for an undisclosed sum on Wednesday.
Founded in 2014, Hawxeye develops advanced video analytics products for applications including smart retail, connected home, residential security and image or video processing.
The platform exploits deep computer vision technology to accurately recognise faces and objects. It is currently used in retail to record the shop path of each individual customer and track which items they viewed but chose not to buy.
Hawxeye was co-founded by Marios Savvides, leader of the CyLab Biometrics Center in CMU’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.
Bossa Nova has partnered the lab and appointed Savvides as its chief artificial intelligence (AI) scientist to upgrade Hawxeye for the precise recognition of retail products in line with the corporate’s robotics range.
As a result of the transaction, Bossa Nova will gain 52 intellectual properties relating to deep learning, correlation 3D modelling, and other product recognition technologies.
Hawxeye does not appear to have publicised details of funding previously.
Savvides said: “Bossa Nova is changing the retail ecosystem. They deliver unparalleled real-time product data to the largest retailers in the world through fully autonomous service robots.
“When combined with their robotics technology, our AI can unlock unprecedented levels of accuracy, reliability and scale in retail scene understanding. With Bossa Nova, we are confident we can create a new era of retail data and analytics.”