Qualcomm Uses ISC West To Spotlight Its Smart Cameras Vision In Cities And Outdoor Spaces

Last week, Qualcomm used the International Security Conference and Exposition (ISC West) to showcase its vision of what’s needed to significantly enhance the smart camera IoT experience in cities, enterprise environments and the outdoor space. Qualcomm’s new QCS7230 solution is designed to facilitate safer and more safeguarded enterprises and neighborhoods.

This ground is not new territory for Qualcomm. This new chip solution expands the company’s existing Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform offering, which focuses on the digital transformation of enterprise security and public safety segments to help protect environments at the connected edge-based smart devices level.

This announcement is welcome news in my view. Throughout the pandemic, neighborhoods, communities and governments have adopted smart cameras to comprehend a new normal that now must accommodate mask monitoring, social distancing, tracking occupancy levels inside and outside of the home and routine working processes. The “smart” elements of a camera now have robust connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and cloud technologies, making them indispensable for cities and businesses to deliver real-time intelligence. The goal of this real-time intelligence is to help generate enhanced insights that improve the quality of life for society and drive better business decision-making and results.

From a business perspective, this new smart camera technology portfolio also presents Qualcomm with a significant business opportunity to provide end-to-end solutions with IoT as a Service (IoTaaS) to satisfy broader needs for smart cameras across multiple industries and market segments.

Qualcomm’s new offering has technology attributes with best-in-class AI inferencing at the edge, improved security, and operation-effectiveness that has real-time edge compute, AI, machine learning (ML) and analytics fundamentals. Qualcomm appears to recognize that as the number of intelligent devices grows at the connected intelligent edge, the ability to provide a consistently productive, useful, and satisfying experience grows more complicated and challenging. Security and privacy-related issues have become more profound and complex as well. Qualcomm’s approach comprehends the fact that modern devices depend on excellent connectivity, robust interoperability, edge proficiencies, and AI abilities to support the variety and complexity of use cases that the smart camera is being used for today.

Not surprisingly, Qualcomm’s coattails in the space have enabled the company to round up an impressive roster of smart camera ecosystem leaders. As with other ingredient capabilities that the company offers in the mobile device space, Qualcomm’s IoT offerings tend to have a proliferation and development aspect to it, which will likely lead to the rapid introduction of new smart camera solutions in the enterprise and cities markets before the end of 2022.

A few closing thoughts

As I’ve indicated above, security and surveillance have experienced incredible growth in deployment over the past couple of years. Not only has the volume of smart cameras increased, but the image quality of these devices has improved exponentially. This latter point is crucial as enhanced image quality allows security departments to view, interpret, and analyze video and data more meaningfully. Better AI and analytics are needed to comprehend the flood of images generated by these devices.

Qualcomm’s new capability is capitalizing on a growing trend from a business perspective. Cities, businesses and other entities need these capabilities to deal with such an abundance of real-time data. Lacking these innovations makes it almost impossible to provide the quality of business decisions and quality of life improvements (e.g., better security) in a streamlined and efficient manner.

The sensor transition from full HD (FHD) to 4K resolution, quickly becoming baseline in the smart camera space, has enormous implications. Affordable smart cameras are rapidly gaining serious compute capabilities that facilitate accurate people and object detection and vehicle identification, which can dramatically mitigate false-positive errors. Video collaboration, access control, home and enterprise security, 360-degree cameras, dash (and wearable) cameras will benefit from these new capabilities that Qualcomm is bringing to market, and the company’s credibility in the space will likely lead to rapid adoption by device manufacturers.

Mark Vena is the CEO and Principal Analyst at SmartTech Research based in Silicon Valley. As a technology industry veteran for over 25 years, Mark covers many consumer tech topics, including PCs, smartphones, smart home, connected health, security, PC and console gaming, and streaming entertainment solutions. Mark has held senior marketing and business leadership positions at Compaq, Dell, Alienware, Synaptics, Sling Media and Neato Robotics. Mark has appeared on CNBC, NBC News, ABC News, Business Today, The Discovery Channel and other media outlets. Mark’s analysis and commentary have appeared on Forbes.com and other well-known business news and research sites. His comments about the consumer tech space have repeatedly appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, TechNewsWorld and other news publications.

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