AI Processors Matter When Selecting Fleet Dashcams

Market research firm Strategy Analytics’ recent whitepaper looks at why AI processors matter when it comes to selecting dash cams for commercial vehicle fleets. It concludes that Ambarella’s CV22 edge AI perception SoC excels with respect to the five key characteristics that impact performance, power efficiency and behavioral detection.

Dashcams have become essential in commercial vehicles as fleet operators look to ensure the safety of drivers and other road users, minimize the risk of collisions and keep insurance costs down. Building on the standard features of recording front and rear vehicle views during journeys, a growing number of these devices are employing artificial intelligence (AI) to accurately and quickly alert drivers to unsafe driving conditions, such as cell phone distraction, speeding or close following of the vehicle ahead.

However, as Strategy Analytics points out in its paper entitled Why AI Processors Matter – How to Select the Best AI Dash Cam for Your Fleet, not all dash cams are created equal when it comes to the AI processors that power them. According to this well-respected analyst firm, all too often the limitations of AI processors don’t reveal themselves as shortcomings until after the investment has been made and dash cams are already deployed in the field. The firm advises commercial fleet managers to take a deep look into the technical specifications of AI processors used in popular dash cams prior to making a long-term investment, in order to avoid problems such as dash cams getting too hot, which decreases resolution and impairs the camera’s ability to see in low-light and high-contrast conditions. Selecting a dash cam with an inferior AI processor could also result in missing the vast majority of unsafe driving behaviors or generating very few accurate alerts. In particular, Strategy Analytics recommends considering the following five key characteristics:

  1. Excellent real-world performance, allowing multiple AI models to be run on the edge simultaneously for faster and more accurate detection of high-risk behaviors
  2. Very low power consumption (typically 2.5-3.0 W for a dash cam’s AI processor) to improve performance and reliability
  3. A powerful image processing pipeline for creating clearer image quality and capturing more actionable data
  4. Robust developer support from the vendor for custom AI models, leading to improved behavior detection and faster feature deployment
  5. Strong price-to-value ratio and a wide range of chips to help control long-term costs and ensure maximum ROI

In writing the whitepaper, Strategy Analytics evaluated a number of AI processors on the market and concluded that the Ambarella CV22 CVflow® edge AI perception SoC excels in all five of these key characteristics.

The CV22’s CVflow architecture provides AI computer vision processing to enable image recognition over long distances and with high accuracy. It includes efficient 4K encoding in both the AVC and HEVC video formats, delivering high-resolution video streaming with very low bitrates to minimize storage requirements. An integrated ISP (Image Signal Processor) provides outstanding imaging in low light conditions, with 4K or 8-Megapixel resolution at 60 frames per second. Additionally, the ISP’s HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing extracts maximum image detail in high contrast scenes, further enhancing the computer vision capabilities of the chip.

Last year it was announced that Motive Technologies (formerly known as KeepTruckin) had selected the Ambarella CV22 for its new AI dashcam. This dashcam uses a single CV22 SoC to simultaneously provide AI and image processing for the Motive dual-camera system, which integrates one camera for the front advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) with incident recording, and a second RGB-IR camera for the driver-monitoring system (DMS) with driver recording. Ambarella’s industry-leading edge AI processing performance-per-watt enables the AI Dashcam to run Motive’s proprietary sophisticated and accurate AI algorithms for real-time high-risk behavior detection and active warnings directly on the small form factor device, with minimal heat dissipation.

To download the Strategy Analytics Why AI Processors Matter whitepaper click here.