Ambarella is a big player in the video surveillance market, but not a familiar name to many buyers of security cameras. They don’t make cameras, but they make the computer chips inside. Founded in 2004, Ambarella began in the broadcast infrastructure encoders market and entered the market for professional security cameras in 2008. More recently, the company has also entered the market for automotive OEM solutions.

The even newer CV2 camera SoC, introduced in late-March, delivers up to 20 times the deep neural network performance of Ambarella's first generation CV1 chip, also with low power consumption.

Q: Historically, video analytics have over-promised and under-delivered. What would you say to a sceptical user in terms of how much confidence they should have in the next wave of products?

Day: Ambarella has been in the security business for 10 years, and some of us have been in the business for 15 years. Every year I’ve been disappointed by the analytics I have seen at the ISC West show. Every year there are incremental improvements – 2 percent, 5 percent, whatever – but in general, I became a sceptic, as well. What is fundamentally different now is the neural network approach to computer vision. Even for us developing these chips: In CV1 we had a certain level of deep neural network performance. We produced CV22 in the same year with four times the performance, and then CV2 has 20 times the performance in the space of one year. That’s just at the chip level. But the neural network approach to analytics and computer vision is game changing if you look at the things you can do with it compared to traditional analytics approaches. If you look at what it’s doing in automotive and security, you will see significant development. I totally appreciate the scepticism, but I think it is completely game-changing at this point, based on the technology in the chips and based on what’s happening with neural networks.

Q: What do you think the next big thing is?

Day: I think the next big thing is the neural networks; it’s the intelligence in the camera. People have been pushing toward higher resolution, we’ve done 4K, we have incredible imaging even in really dark scenes. So we have been solving all those problems. And so now to add the computer vision and be able to do that in parallel with the image processing and high-resolution encoding, and all in a chip that is low-power. That’s the differentiator.

Q: What else is happening?

Jerome Gigot, Senior Director Marketing: There is a lot happening on the consumer side, too, with the home security market. You will see cameras in your home with more and more intelligence. Some are used for video doorbells. On some of the new cameras, we have package notification – you get notified if a package arrives, or if someone steals your package. And new battery-powered cameras are very easy to install with no wires.