With all the buzzwords being thrown about lately it is hard to know what these terms actually mean. Where gadgets are concerned one of the most banded about terms is ‘Smart’. Now, despite the term itself suggesting intelligence, these devices are actually pretty stupid. What I mean by this is that the devices themselves do not do much of the computing, they just access the cloud and the cloud does most of the work.
“The cameras are typically not very high-performance, both in terms of resolution and capability,” says Raj Talluri, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of product management. “They have a hard time recognizing the difference between a car driving down the street or someone coming up to the door.”
Qualcomm wish to change this state of things (internet of,that is) ,and, have decided to make a better more intelligent internet security camera. The company have specifically developed a new chip just for security cameras and the ground-breaking part of this new chip is that the camera will actually recognise what it is looking at without running to the cloud for backup.
Now, most smart cameras on the market today (consumer market anyway) do not record all the time. They will only turn themselves on when they see something, this something is usually motion. So, if you have cats, or the postman delivering etc, the camera has to connect to the cloud, recognise it, consume bandwidth and of course it will be recording taking up storage.
On the other hand, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 618 IP camera platform can do on-camera analytics, so things like face detection, object recognition and object tracking are all done on the camera. What this means is that the next time a cat jumps in front of your security camera, the cam will recognize it as the non-event it is, and never fully power up or hog your Internet connection. The chip also includes an integrated LTE modem for cameras that need to connect away from a Wi-Fi network.
Talluri says its cameras and devices using its new platforms could start to appear in the first half of next year.