Imagine a world where nothing breaks down. Everything’s reliable. Whether it’s your car, your plane or your commuter train, nothing’s ever late. Everything just works. Then as you hop off your always-reliable train that’s never late, you whiz into a store, grab dinner off the shelf and walk straight out. No one arrests you for shoplifting. Instead your credit card charges you for what you’ve taken. There are no long checkout queues, self-scanning machines and everything’s cheaper, since the retailer saves on expensive retail payment hardware and armies of checkout staff.

All this can soon be possible, largely thanks to Computer Vision on the Network Edge.

David Bradley talks to Alex Taylor, founder and CEO of Net4, the Internet of Things provider that’s working with ARM Holdings, both at the cutting edge of developing and rolling out computer vision on the network edge. Alex tells his story and describes  opportunities now for listeners. 

If you’re not familiar with the term, computer vision is the application of powerful computers to process and analyse optical and video data, in greater quantity, depth and detail than ever before. This then provides previously undreamed information for decisions and subsequent actions – whether for humans, robots or other automated systems.

The network edge refers to where this processing happens. The problem with sending video to the Cloud is prohibitively huge cost. So to avoid that, Net4 house their video processing computers physically near camera feeds – on the “network edge”. That means no cloud processing charges from Amazon, Microsoft or Google too.

If you want to find out about Net4’s smarts and whether they are poised to dominate this fast growing and valuable niche, listen in.