New Qualcomm chip will make security cameras more intelligent

Qualcomm has created a new kind of chip, Snapdragon processor built into internet-connected security cameras. The company announced the chip along with a reference design for new home monitoring cameras, with the Qualcomm's chip at the core.

The reference camera is designed and sold by Thundersoft. The chip put genuine smarts in the camera. For example, it will only respond to people.

The new camera chip is a substantially more powerful processor than other current average chips in home cameras. It can even run two cameras at a time.

Qualcomm's new chip, as reported on The Register, has Snapdragon 618 processor at the core. It offers a six-core, 64 bit CPU with dual 1.8GHz ARM Cortex TM-A72 cores and four 1.2GHz Cortex A53 cores.

The chip works in LTE carrier aggregation, all the Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. It has an Adreno GPU and Hexagon digital signal processor, support for 4k video and 21-megapixel images.

The camera chip allows the cameras to work a lot faster than average cameras. The chip will allow the camera to do all image analysis locally. The camera with the chip will be able to perform face detection, object recognition and object tracking.

The Qualcomm's technology in image analysis, according to Mashable, also saves costs by allowing more sophisticated detection to occur within the camera. For example, when car passes or a pet jumps in front of the camera, it will ignore the event and will not send the event to the cloud. Such events will not tax the internet connection.

The camera with the chip will be able to analyze and send an image in far less delay between an event happens. For example when the camera captures someone opening the door, a notification to user will be received a lot faster.

Qualcomm's Vice President of Product Management Raj Talluri said, as reported on The Verge, that the company has done a lot of work getting cameras and computer vision optimized in the phone space.

Talluri said that working on home camera device is typically harder than in the phone space - a phone has a pinhole camera and is always moving - but now the company is bringing the technology into different application and it applied perfectly.

The company also announced a pair of LTE modem chips for Internet of Things devices, one for continual connections and one for low data rates. The modem chips offer the highest power efficiency among other chips.

The Qualcomm-powered safety camera and other devices using the new chips will be available in the market in the first half on next year.