Huawei Software Defined Cameras

Author: John Honovich, Published on Jun 25, 2018 

Huawei is aiming to break the reputation of Chinese companies not being good at software. The company is now leading their video surveillance marketing with 'Software Defined Camera' at the IFSEC 2018 show:

What is a 'software defined camera'? In this note, based on an interview with Huawei, we answer that question and contrast Huawei's approach with Axis, Dahua, and Hikvision?

Software Defined Camera = Camera Apps

Huawei's software defined camera is, as they described it themselves, akin to the App store on iPhones. Rather than a phone shipped with limited software, Huawei's upcoming cameras will allow adding 3rd party applications.

Their pitch says that Huawei cameras have an 'OS' level (beyond the Hisilicon SOC) that allows 3rd party applications to be loaded (i.e., the Studio) and can be managed via the 'Controller':

Huawei also showed a demo of the Controller interface where they showed dragging and dropping applications on to cameras:

Huawei could not explain how they dealt with processor limitations of certain models beyond noting that some cameras were 'AI' enabled and others were not, still a key limitation of edge-based video analytics.

Below is Huawei's marketing pitch as delivered by a hired American marketer at a different show earlier this year. Note the first thing he emphasizes even for this is that they "are going to be an extremely low price point":

The Upside / Potential

Extending the App store / iPhone analogy, the upside is that Huawei could deliver far more functionality and capabilities than any other camera manufacturer, making their cameras a 'standard' that users rally to use over limited intelligence / application cameras.

Axis Has Had This For 9 Years

Axis has literally had this same platform for 9 years: See 2009: Axis Camera Application Platform (ACAP) Launched. Indeed, 6 years ago, when Axis declared the MP r*** over, Axis wrongly affirmed:

The r*** for business and operational intelligence begins. With the ability to download and run applications directly at the edge, the IP camera is now the iPhone of the surveillance world

ACAP still exists and there are 100+ applications for it, including ~80 from 3rd party developers (including AgentVI, Axxonsoft, and Exacq). If you have never heard of ACAP or had not heard it for years, do not feel bad. It has never become a mainstream offering nor has there been a 'killer app' to drive usage of the platform.

Huawei Oblivious To Axis

On the other hand, one would imagine Huawei has heard of this. We explained Axis ACAP to Huawei. However, they told us Axis is good in analog cameras but not IP.

Problems With App Store Model

While the phone analogy generates a lot of excitement (i.e., look how big smartphones have become), making this work with IP cameras is a lot harder. A few reasons:

• Most applications for IP cameras that have high value have high computing resources requirements (i.e., analytics), making it hard to 'fit' them on IP cameras. By contrast, the most popular applications for smartphones have low requirements (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc.).

• Related, optimizing and supporting third-party applications on IP cameras is more demanding than on phones. Indeed, this is why most high-end analytics are run on dedicated 'smart' cameras or outside the camera (servers or cloud).

• There is no evidence yet that a 'long tail' of apps exists for IP cameras, meaning that it typically makes the most sense to develop your own applications (e.g., the Avigilon approach). Even Axis has increasingly expanded their own applications for the most commonly used scenarios.

Beyond that, Axis struggled with the distribution approach. Axis ACAP apps had to be bought separately, making it cumbersome to sell and manage (e.g., one thing they rectified by buying Cognimatics).

Compared to Dahua and Hikvision

Dahua and Hikvision, to date, have focused primarily on their own (mostly broken) analytics. For example, it has now been 2 years since Hikvision announced DeepInMind, it is being handheld in Europe and still pulled from release in the US. Neither has marketed an app store for their cameras.

On the other hand, Hikvision has promoted open collaboration with their recent AI Cloud announcement, but how close that is to reality and what real partners they will use remains to be seen.