KeepTruckin partners with Ambarella to develop next-generation AI device for ADAS

KeepTruckin, a provider of fleet management technology, has selected Ambarella’s CV22 CVflow edge AI vision system on chip for its new AI Dashcam.

This latest AI Dashcam, also announced today, uses a single CV22 SoC to simultaneously provide AI and image processing for its dual-camera system, which integrates one camera for the front advanced driver assistance system with incident recording, and a second RGB-IR camera for the driver-monitoring system with driver recording.

Additionally, with Ambarella’s industry-leading edge AI processing performance-per-watt, the CV22 enables the AI Dashcam to run KeepTruckin’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.

Ian Riches, VP automotive practice and director at strategy analytics, says: “KeepTruckin’s selection of Ambarella SoCs for its new AI Dashcam gives it a powerful, cost-effective and efficient platform on which to build.

“Ambarella’s ecosystem gives it the tools required to develop tailored AI solutions that will be of benefit to its fleet customers.”

Front ADAS features enabled by the CV22 include warnings for close following, lane departures, forward collisions, speeding and traffic violations.

Using the same SoC, running multiple simultaneous neural network models, the in-cabin camera’s DMS capabilities include monitoring for driver fatigue, distraction and policy violations, such as contextual cell phone use or seatbelt monitoring, in combination with data from the front camera.

Jai Ranganathan, SVP product, KeepTruckin, says: “KeepTruckin’s AI Dashcam leverages Ambarella’s industry-leading edge AI and vision processing performance to deliver advanced AI-based features that detect high-risk behavior with outstanding accuracy and efficiency.

“Our continued fleet management innovation is enabled by Ambarella’s scalable range of CVflow AI vision SoCs, which are all supported by a common, robust SDK, enabling a platform approach to our product development.”

Fermi Wang, president and CEO of Ambarella, says: “Maximizing fleet safety and productivity is one of the keys to a successful, growing global economy.

“By partnering with KeepTruckin to add more intelligence into commercial vehicles, we can help these businesses prevent accidents, protect drivers and lower operating costs.”

The AI Dashcam is connected to the KeepTruckin Vehicle Gateway, which uploads the pre-analyzed data, video and still images to KeepTruckin’s cloud-based fleet management software in real-time.

The CV22 SoC integrates Ambarella’s proven image signal processor, which provides high quality, 1440p resolution HDR videos across all lighting conditions, while utilizing its on-chip H.264/H.265 encoding to reduce transmission bandwidth and storage costs.

KeepTruckin can easily upload additional features to the CV22 over time, via over-the-air software updates, to deliver incremental value to clients that invest in the platform.

Moreover, KeepTruckin’s model training becomes increasingly more precise due to its in-house safety team assessing quality in real-time, adding additional risk context and providing input that makes model training and development cycles shorter.

Ambarella’s CVflow AI architecture is both fully programmable and highly efficient, providing significant computer vision performance with very low power consumption, which increases reliability and efficiency to run more models in parallel leading to greater detection and visibility all around.

Additionally, its complete set of CV tools helps customers like KeepTruckin port their own neural networks and includes support for industry-standard machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, ONNX, Caffe and TensorFlow.

Other key features of Ambarella’s CV22 SoC enabling the high performance of KeepTruckin’s latest AI Dashcam include:

• High dynamic range and excellent low-light/nighttime performance
• Wide field of view for more coverage
• RGB-IR processing to maintain daytime color fidelity, while recording in monochrome at night, without compromising DMS performance and eliminating need for mechanical IR cut filter, which increases reliability