Neurala and Azena Collaborate to Deliver More Affordable AI for Smart Cameras
Boston, MA—Neurala has announced a partnership with Azena, an open platform and marketplace for AI-enabled video analytics solutions. Neurala’s Edge-friendly vision AI software will be deployed as a part of Azena’s marketplace of plug-and-play AI applications to enable developers, integrators, and end users to easily create and update custom AI models directly on smart cameras.
An IoT platform provider, Azena accelerates the speed of innovation for security cameras and applications by connecting camera manufacturers, SoC providers, application developers, VMS providers and systems integrators. As a part of this, the Azena Application Store was created to give businesses, systems integrators, end users and app developers access to a wide variety of apps that add intelligence to Azena platform-compatible cameras. Now, through the Neurala VIA Inspector app, users can deploy personalized AI models to solve company-specific use cases that would otherwise have required significant investments in time, money, and hardware. Use case examples include: assigned parking verification, hot desking and space occupancy monitoring in office environments, and checkout efficiency monitoring in retail settings.
Neurala’s VIA Inspector app is now available in the Azena marketplace and can be tried, at no cost, for up to 30 days. Powered by Neurala’s patented Lifelong-DNN technology, a deep learning framework that allows learning on almost any device, the new product supports the development or updating of custom AI models, directly on a smart camera, without specialized knowledge or additional hardware required. Users access the app through a browser, define the objects of interest to inspect or monitor, and can train AI models directly on the camera or using an optional cloud service. Once the model has been trained, the inspection can be activated on the camera and the app will provide predictions from the model to the Azena IoT Gateway, ready to be consumed via various protocols, such as MQTT, RESTful interface and more. These messages can then be incorporated into downstream business applications which can provide the associated remediation or reporting activity.
“We are on a mission to make AI more accessible, affordable, and applicable for real-world applications across industries, so we are thrilled to be partnering with Azena to do just that,” said Max Versace, CEO and co-founder of Neurala. “Azena shares our philosophy that in order for AI to become truly ubiquitous, it needs to be easier to deploy and implement, and it needs to leverage local, edge computing resources that are increasingly the norm in the industry. By creating this new app for the Azena Application Store, developers, integrators and end users around the world will be able to easily and cost-effectively build AI into their systems –- regardless of skill level or AI expertise.”
“Adding Neurala’s VIA Inspector to the Azena Application Store will be a game changer for our ecosystem partners,” said Hartmut Schaper, CEO, Azena. “The VIA Inspector app allows non-technical users to easily train or update AI models directly on Azena platform-compatible smart devices. This provides our customers and partners with an efficient and effective way to develop a solution without the need for specialized AI expertise or additional hardware.”
For more information, visit: https://store.azena.com/shop/p/A_00140000.
About Neurala
Neurala is a pioneer in vision AI software. On a mission to make AI more applicable and useful in real-world applications, Neurala helps industrial companies improve their quality inspection process, with technology that dramatically reduces the time, cost and skills required to build and maintain production-quality custom vision AI solutions. Founded in 2006, Neurala’s research team invented Lifelong-DNN™ (L-DNN) technology, which lowers the data requirements for AI model development and enables continuous learning in the cloud or at the edge. Neurala is headquartered in Boston, MA, with a European subsidiary in Trieste, Italy.
About Azena
Azena operates an open IoT platform that connects camera manufacturers, SoC providers, application developers, VMS providers, and systems integrators. Its goal is to accelerate the speed of innovation for security cameras and applications that make use of AI and computer vision. To achieve this, the company offers a free and open operating system for security cameras, a development tool kit for app developers and a device management portal as well as an application store for integrators. Azena is headquartered in Munich, Germany, and has been on the market since September 2018.