The smart home is here, but where are the smart cameras?

Having a security camera at my front door seemed like a good idea at that time. So you can imagine my surprise when something as basic as connecting the power cord became a major issue. Though it may look like a single problem, it really represents two major issues with first generation home security cameras.

First, I needed to figure out how to extend the power cord to the installation point. That means locating the nearest power source, estimating the length of the cable and how to make it all weather-proof. I’m not a great believer in “more saving more doing” as the commercial suggests, but rather, let’s just say, I spent my precious weekend downtime working on what I thought would be a pretty straightforward one hour installation effort.  The bigger issue was of course the realization that the negative aesthetics caused by running the power cord along the outside wall would be a non-starter for my better half... 

The market winners

It is not coincidental that battery operated security cameras is one of the hottest product categories. Companies enabling cordless cameras and innovative video applications are considered some of the hottest-selling solutions on the market.

For example, Arlo, a leading vendor of battery-operated security cameras did their IPO in August 2018 after it was spun off from Netgear.  Arlo is selling their battery operated cameras for over $100 a piece, a significant premium over legacy video cameras. Ring, the company that brought the video doorbells to middle America, was acquired by Amazon in Feb 2018 for more than $1B.  A basic Google search for smart home battery operated security cameras shows how fast this sector is growing.  All this is happening at a time that you can buy many models of residential wired security cameras for as low as $30-40 apiece.

Connecting the dots, I suggest three main takeaways: The first one is that “legacy” security cameras have become a commodity which is losing market share at a rapid pace. Second, power cords are a major barrier for consumers adoption. Going wire-free will help bring smart home security cameras into the mainstream. Last but certainly not least, consumers are smart and appreciate high quality, easy to use innovative products. And are willing to pay for it!

Getting back to my personal journey in the world of home security cameras, having learned from my previous experience, I recently installed a battery-operated motion triggered camera above my front door. Compared to wasting my entire weekend, the installation was pretty easy including the automated wireless setup easy-to-use mobile app.

Although the installation was painless, in terms of daily operation the amount of notifications and videos quickly became annoying. As a workaround, I set up the activation time to operate only at times when I do not expect any movement. Now that its only working from 11pm to 6am, the amount of video notifications has become reasonable.  However, I am not exposed to any intrusions or people wondering around my front door during the day.

I also learned some important lessons along the way.

It seems there are a few cats that visit my yard almost every night. It was actually quite interesting the first time I saw them in the video clips, but after a week of receiving five cat videos a night… arrggghh.

The second issue that become clear is that if I let my dog out, I have to turn off the camera, otherwise I get a dozen daily dog videos that are a waste of time and precious battery life. 

The era of smarter cameras

From my perspective, the current security camera market is like the TV market in 2010 - before the introduction smart TVs. Security video cameras have three major components: The image sensor that generates the raw video stream, the SoC that compresses the raw video and the WIFI communications chip-set. Some of them have a PIR (Passive Infrared) motion sensors used as triggers. These cameras send a 10 second video to the cloud anytime they are triggered by anything in motion. Most of them today support HD or FHD and it’s very hard to differentiate between them based on image quality.

To me, waking up, capturing a 10 second video clip and automatically sending it to the cloud along with an alert to the user is not really that smart. Smart would be to understand and differentiate between background and meaningful events. Smart is letting me know what to expect - whether it’s a human, a pet or someone else’s car in my driveway.

Enabling technology for smart cameras

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the cutting edge of what makes a camera smart. For computer vision and image processing applications, however, some key challenges must still be addressed:

Low processing power. AI at the cloud runs on multiple servers with access to an unlimited power source, while AI for autonomous vehicles requires only 30 watts to power its application. Running AI on a mobile phone would consume around 3 watts. The real challenge is that AI running on an IoT devices requires a power consumption level of a miniscule 30 milliwatts, making it two orders of magnitude less than today’s solutions.

Low resource consumption . Similar to power challenges, IoT devices’ demand for computing resources must be reduced by two orders of magnitude. Leveraging low power microprocessors means that memory usage is in the hundreds of kilobytes, and the CPU clock is around 100MHz. Comparing this to traditional embedded platforms that use external DRAM with hundreds of megabytes and GHz level CPU cores, there is a significant challenge in making AI effective in the world of IoT.

Low cost. It goes without saying that cost is a key factor for any consumer product. But the nice thing here is that if you create  the algorithms that  run on  low power with minimal computing  resources, then - by definition - the platform would be cost effective.. 

Emza Visual Sense

Emza Visual Sense is a technology provider of ultra-low-power AI solutions. As a fully owned subsidiary of Himax Technologies Inc (NASDAQ: HIMX), Emza provides a complete solution of computer vision at the edge using low power imaging CMOS sensors, low power MCU and low power SW. Emza’s solutions can determine human classifications using just a few milliwatts of power, running on low power MCUs such as ARM M4 cores.

Summary

I’m fed up with stupid cameras. I know exactly what I want – a smart camera that will show me only relevant videos with relevant events, and run for at least one year on its original batteries. I have a strong belief that most consumers would also like to have a smart camera and a positive home security camera customer experience. The technology building blocks are out there and Emza is the company who is making it a reality. 

Let’s Get Smart!

About the author

Elad Baram is the VP Products at Emza visual sense, a leading provider of ultra-low power computer vision solutions. He can be contacted at [email protected]