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Qualcomm proposes brain implants for IP cameras

Lots of grunt, video recognition, default passwords, high-speed comms, what could go wrong?

If you take the vision stuff at face value, the latest company to announce its vision of hell on Earth is Qualcomm, which some of the more breathless of the tech press reckons wants to create the “conscious” camera.

Well, it's a little shy of consciousness, thank heavens.

What the chip-shipper has announced is an IP camera chipset with a reference design placing its very own Snapdragon 618 at the core. Which won't scare the HPC crowd, but as a six-core, 64-bit CPU with dual 1.8GHz ARM CortexTM-A72 cores and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores, it's no wimp in the bit-bustling stakes.

The reference platform also tosses in LTE with carrier aggregation, all the Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth you'll ever need or want, an Adreno GPU and Hexagon digital signal processor, support for 4K video and 21 megapixel images. Or in other words, enough smarts that such a camera might just get bored hanging watching your driveway when it could have been strapped to a rocket and sent to take a quick peek at the Oort Cloud.

But it's the extras in Qualcomm's reference design that press Vulture South's “what are you thinking?” buttons.

The reference platform, designed (and sold by) Thundersoft, seeks to put genuine smarts in the camera: for example, so that instead of illuminating the path for a rabbit, it'll only respond to people.

At the moment, any serious processing needs video to be shipped upstream to processing grunt. As Qualcomm has so aptly demonstrated, it's now just as feasible to push the grunt down into the camera.

There's a strategic angle to be considered as well. No matter what performance slides companies like Qualcomm offer, it's proven ever-so-difficult to displace Intel from the data centre. So why not suck the workload out of the data centre to where Qualcomm owns the chip?

As the silicon-baker's statement says, the reference platform camera “not only streams 4K HEVC, but can perform on-camera video analytics such as object detection, facial detection and recognition, multi object tracking, and Qualcomm Zeroth object classification.”

Quite rightly, the company argues that the on-board smarts will, in (say) a building security application, avoid having a bunch of false positives wasting operators' time.

Vulture South merely hopes that everybody that decides to hang a pint-sized just-about-supercomputer in their lobby has the good sense to change the default passwords, so that manufacturers don't create high-power cams that can be turned into botnets, and that owners don't find themselves stripped naked by Shodan. ®

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