Why is designing your own chip so important for analytics?

Put simply, we can design a chip that’s 100% optimized for network video, and along with a number of other benefits, that means a hardware platform that is ideally suited for video analytics.

Since the first ARTPEC chip was released in 1999, it has formed the basis for many innovations and enhancements Axis has delivered to the industry, such as Axis Lightfinder, Axis Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), Axis Zipstream. Essentially, ARTPEC provides the platform for delivering the highest-quality video, which is crucial for high-quality analytics.

Through designing our own chip, we have created surveillance cameras which are incredibly powerful processing devices, and which allow us to take full advantage of having increasingly intelligent analytics placed on the ‘edge’ of the network, within the cameras.

Analytics within the camera itself, close to the capture of the video, brings several benefits. It allows for faster alerts, decisions, and response without delays. Less bandwidth, storage and server infrastructure is consumed; thus, it scales better. Since the transmitted data can be limited, it also enables keeping sensitive data safe. And running analytics on the uncompressed video at the edge means that no information is lost in compression.

Analytics at the edge means greater efficiency and effectiveness in the system. Alongside this, modern development tools are enabling hybrid architectures, making the best use of edge, cloud- and on-premise-based server environments. This means that edge devices can do the lion’s share of the analytics, and the results can be combined with data from other sources and analyzed further on servers in the cloud or on-premise. Distributing processing throughout the system lowers costs and enables a better user experience with greater customer value.