NVIDIA : Alibaba, Huawei Adopt NVIDIA’s Metropolis AI Smart Cities Platform

Metropolis, our platform for building AI smart cities, has added Alibaba and Huawei as new partners, and now includes the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit in general availability.

Alibaba and Huawei join more than 50 of the world's leading companies already using NVIDIA Metropolis. Together, we're taking advantage of the more than 1 billion video cameras that will be in our cities by the year 2020 to solve a dizzying array of problems.

Our DeepStream SDK simplifies the development of scalable intelligent video analytics powered by deep learning for AI cities and hyperscale data centers. Developers can use DeepStream to process, understand and categorize video frames in real time and meet the most demanding throughput and latency requirements.

Unveiled in May, Metropolis is an edge-to-cloud video platform that includes tools, technologies and support to build smarter, faster AI-powered applications for everything from traffic and parking management to law enforcement and city services.

China IVA Companies Select Metropolis

Offering a striking demonstration of what Metropolis makes possible, Hikvision has achieved recall rates of more than 90 percent for its identification and matching technology despite data volumes growing by more than 10x. This makes it easier to find lost people in crowded places.

To achieve this, Hikvision combines a camera and network video recorder with NVIDIA Jetson at the edge, cloud servers powered by NVIDIA Tesla P4 GPU accelerators, and the massive computing power of the DGX-1 AI supercomputer for training.

'The GPU's outstanding performance and NVIDIA's end-to-end AI and deep learning platform can be applied to video streams to create smarter applications for a variety of industries,' said Shiliang Pu, president at Hikvision Research Institute.

Dahua demonstrated at a recent G20 Summit how it used GPU-based deep learning to do real-time face recognition, enabling security teams to extend their capabilities and effectively take on the work of 100+ personnel.

'We're working with NVIDIA to bring AI to our next-generation of deep learning products,' said Xingming Zhang, vice president of Dahua R&D Center. 'Dahua's DeepSense advanced, high-capacity video analytics server delivers a powerful, scalable method of extracting rich metadata and processing structural data. This delivers fast and accurate analytics for vehicles, non-motorized vehicles and human identification.'

New partners Alibaba and Huawei also showed how they're putting Metropolis to use.

ET Brain is Alibaba Cloud's proprietary AI program that aims to help different verticals tackle real-world challenges and unleash their development potential. For example, Alibaba Cloud's City Brain offers urban planners the AI empowerment to upgrade their city governance, such as real-time traffic management and prediction, city services and smarter drainage systems. City Brain helped to ease traffic congestion by as much as 11 percent in Hangzhou's pilot district.

Meanwhile, Huawei's video content management (VCM) product is equipped with Tesla P4 GPU accelerators, improving overall performance by 22x. The VCM supports deep learning mainstream frameworks and provides intelligent algorithms for accurate face recognition, pedestrian-vehicle structuring and reverse image search. Speed is significantly improved using the NVIDIA TensorRT deep learning inference optimizer and DeepStream SDK.

'Huawei video surveillance cooperates with NVIDIA and teams up with the Shenzhen Police for joint innovation, making cities more intelligent in the future,' said Tingyong Liu, general manager of the video surveillance domain at Huawei.

Go Ahead, Pick a Software Partner

We're bringing even more of the world's best AI companies into the mix with a new partner program designed to speed up the development of new products on Metropolis.

Announced last week, our Metropolis Software Partner Program brings together a dozen software partners to offer a curated list of applications that make it easy for systems integrators and hardware vendors to build new products.

One of those partners is SenseTime, a facial recognition solution for public safety, retail and access control. Already working with Chinese industry leaders, including China Mobile Communications Corp, China UnionPay and Sina Weibo Corp, SenseTime applies its technology to the security and surveillance, finance, education and robotics sectors.

'As an NVIDIA AI City platform partner, SenseTime's algorithms work well with NVIDIA's GPUs,' said Li Xu, co-founder and CEO of SenseTime. 'We're very glad to take advantage of our innovative deep learning technologies to power up the construction of smart cities through the Metropolis platform along with NVIDIA. Together, we'll precisely and quickly convert massive video data into deep insights and unleash the infinite potential of AI.'

The AI City Lights Up Beijing

See the AI city of the future on display at GTC China, in Beijing, this week.