Qualcomm has made available the Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) software development kit (SDK) on Qualcomm Developer Network.

The Snapdragon NPE is a deep learning software framework designed for Snapdragon Mobile Platforms. It is engineered to provide developers with software tools to accelerate deep neural network workloads on mobile and other edge devices powered by Snapdragon processors. Developers can choose the optimal Snapdragon core for the desired user experience - Qualcomm Kryo CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU or Qualcomm Hexagon DSP.

Developers can take advantage of deep learning user experiences like style transfers and filters (augmented reality), scene detection, facial recognition, natural language understanding, object tracking and avoidance, gesturing, and text recognition to name a few.

Facebook has already announced plans to integrate the Snapdragon NPE into the camera of the Facebook app to accelerate Caffe2-powered AR features.

The Snapdragon NPE is compatible with Snapdragon 600 and 800 Series Mobile Platforms. It is designed to support common deep learning frameworks such as Caffe, Caffe2 and Tensorflow, and also offers support for custom layers. The SDK includes runtime software, libraries, APIs, offline model conversion tools, sample code, documentation, and debugging and benchmarking tools.

The Snapdragon NPE is available at Qualcomm Developer Network, found at https://developer.qualcomm.com/ai.