Nvidia has announced two new partners, Huawei and Alibaba, have been added to its smart cities platform Metropolis.

Metropolis is a platform for building artificial intelligence (AI) smart cities, which now includes real-time video categorising with the new DeepStream Software Development Kit.

Over 50 companies around the world already use Nvidia Metropolis and Alibaba and Huawei are the newest partners, hoping to speed up the development of new products in smart cities.

As an edge-to-cloud platform, Metropolis has tools, technologies and support to help build smarter and quicker AI powered applications for services such as law enforcement and urban planning. Nvidia and its partners will use over 1bn connected cameras across smart cities to tackle these problems.

Huawei, Alibaba join Nvidia’s smart city Metropolis
Nvidia & its partners will work together to develop better smart cities

Nvidia’s smart cities platform helps cities ease traffic congestion and allocate city services using a GPU-based intelligent monitoring tool.

One of the partners, Hikvision, has successfully used the platform to develop better products to find lost people in crowded places, combining a camera and video recorder with Nvidia cloud services and edge computing.

Shiliang Pu, president at Hikvision Research Institute, said: “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.”

Along with the announcement of two new partners, Nvidia also announced its new DeepStream software development kit that will simplify the development of video analytics from the cameras situated around cities, which is powered by deep learning and hyper scale data centres.

DeepStream allows video data to be processed, understood and categorised in real-time and meet the latency requirements.

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Alibaba will be using Nvidia’s smart cities platform to improve city governance services of urban planners, whilst Huawei and other partners using the platform are focusing around law enforcement applications.

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