From security cameras to smartphones and action cameras, imaging devices today must perform in far more challenging environments than ever before. Whether it’s a baby monitor in a dim nursery or a traffic camera spotting speeding vehicles at dusk, users expect crisp, clear, and reliable visuals.
Traditional image signal processing (ISP) pipelines often fall short—struggling in poor lighting with motion, or in high dynamic range (HDR) scenes—precisely when clarity matters the most. That’s where AI-enhanced ISP comes in. By integrating neural networks into the imaging pipeline, AI-enhanced ISP reveals more detail, reduces noise, and delivers truer colors and contrast, even in the toughest scenarios.
The Limits of Traditional ISP
Traditional, DSP-based image signal processing, remains powerful, but it is fundamentally rule-based. It can only process the raw data from the sensor, and when pushed beyond those limits, image quality suffers.
- Low light: In dark environments, traditional ISP struggles with noise. Boosting exposure reveals detail in dark areas but amplifies noise, while strong denoising suppresses that noise at the cost of fine detail. The result: a dim nursery on a baby monitor looks grainy and indistinct, or a person walking in a shadowy alley becomes a noisy silhouette with little structural detail remaining.
- Motion: When subjects move, or when the camera itself shifts, traditional ISP has difficulty preserving motion clarity. Motion artifacts like blur and ghosting worsen in low light or HDR scenes, where multiple exposures amplify the problem—obscuring faces, gestures, or hazards.
- HDR: Balancing bright and dark areas with a multi-exposure approach introduces contrast issues, resulting in a loss of detail in high light and shadow areas. Without carefully designed tone-mapping algorithms, a bright window can clip to pure white, while the surface texture of a black couch is lost in low-luminance areas.
These aren’t rare edge cases, they occur daily across consumer, security, and industrial imaging, marking the boundary of what traditional ISP alone can deliver.
How AI Transforms Image Processing
AI-enhanced ISP changes the paradigm by embedding intelligence into the imaging pipeline. Rather than relying on static algorithms, AI models can reveal lost detail, interpret motion, and handle complex lighting in ways traditional ISP pipelines cannot.
- Restoring color and detail in the dark: AI-enhanced ISP recognizes patterns in noise to restore detail while preserving natural color and texture—even at extremely low lux levels.
- Reducing motion blur and ghosting: AI-assisted temporal filtering separates subject motion, camera motion, and HDR multi-exposure motion artifacts, reducing blur and ghosting.
- Smarter HDR: AI-driven tone mapping provides more accurate colors and brightness, maintaining balance between bright and dark regions while avoiding halos and overprocessing.
These advances make a tangible difference: a baby monitor reveals a child’s face in the dark, a security camera captures usable street footage, and an action camera records smooth, streak-free video. The leap isn’t incremental—it’s the difference between unusable footage and actionable clarity.
Balancing Compute Efficiency with Image Quality
Embedding AI adds computational demand. Many AI-enhanced ISP solutions fall into one of two traps: oversized models that overwhelm processors and thermal budgets, or lightweight models that save resources but underdeliver on quality.
Ambarella takes a balanced approach. With our algorithm-first philosophy, Ambarella’s AI-enhanced ISP solutions and edge AI SoCs deliver exceptional image quality without compromising on performance. Here are some key examples of how we do that…
- Built-in AI acceleration: The third generation of our CVflow® AI accelerator, combined with 5nm process technology, makes Ambarella’s SoCs extremely adept at handling concurrent compute workloads, ensuring that AI-based ISP enhancements don’t hinder object detection, classification, or high-resolution video encoding.
- Algorithm efficiency: AI-based ISP enhancements are automatically tuned to alleviate execution bottlenecks on Ambarella SoCs by leveraging the CVflow® accelerator’s unique capabilities—including unstructured pruning, different convolution types, data formats, and more.
- Industry leading AI performance per watt: Ambarella’s AI-enhanced ISP solutions consistently deliver best-in-class image quality at low lux levels and in challenging HDR scenes, while maintaining lower thermal overhead compared to competing solutions.
With Ambarella, customers no longer need to choose between image quality and AI performance—they get both.
A Portfolio of Tools for Every Need
Different imaging challenges require different solutions. Ambarella offers the following broad portfolio of AI-enhanced ISP features that can be scaled to meet diverse requirements.
- AISP: Full-color, AI-enhanced night vision in extreme low-light conditions with significant reduction in noise and minimization of motion artifacts.
- Vivid HDR: Local tone mapping for truer-to-life imaging in high dynamic range scenes.
- True Motion: AI-powered motion artifact reduction for stationary cameras in low light.
- True Motion+: An enhanced version of True Motion, optimized for moving cameras and based on optical flow technology.
- True Motion HDR: Our newest feature, combining HDR processing with motion compensation to improve multi-exposure blending artifacts in complex, high-contrast lighting scenarios.
Ambarella’s CV72 and CV75 edge AI SoC families provide the flexibility to match these features with the right compute resources—whether for compact consumer devices or advanced security systems.
Built for Video First
Some vendors offering AI-enhanced ISP solutions come from a still-image background. Their solutions may enhance single frames, but often falter with video, where motion artifacts, compression, and temporal filtering introduce additional complexity.
As a video-first company, Ambarella’s deep expertise in video encoding ensures that our AI-enhanced ISP solutions deliver consistent, superior results, frame after frame—outperforming competitors in real-world moving-image scenarios.
Developer Flexibility and Integration
Performance matters, but so does flexibility. Ambarella’s SDKs provide developers with API hooks into our ISP pipeline, enabling them to:
- Differentiate their products with proprietary features
- Seamlessly combine Ambarella’s ISP hardware and AI-enhanced ISP software with their own models
- Accelerate the path from development to production
Powering the Next Era of Imaging
Delivering clarity in real-world conditions means solving for more than just brightness or sharpness. It requires imaging platforms that are efficient, robust, and intelligent enough to handle edge AI workloads without compromise.
Customers are leveraging Ambarella’s AI-enhanced ISP portfolio to achieve:
- Unmatched low-light performance, reducing noise while restoring color and detail, even at the lowest lux levels
- Sharper video with reduced motion artifacts, enabling clarity in fast-moving and dynamic environments without blur or ghosting
- Truer HDR, maintaining contrast and detail across complex lighting scenarios without overprocessing or halos
- Optimized efficiency, balancing advanced AI image processing with thermal and compute headroom for concurrent workloads
These capabilities make Ambarella the ideal partner for delivering high quality imaging in security, consumer, and industrial devices.
Whether you’re designing products for safety, automation, or everyday experiences, we invite you to contact us and explore how our image processing technology can transform your systems.
Learn more at our Security products page.