Xiaomi has kicked off sales in China of the new Smart Camera 4 Max AI Zoom Edition, a home surveillance camera designed for the home that relies on a dual-sensor system and on various functions based on artificial intelligence.
Launched in April on the YouPin crowdfunding platform, the new gadget is now finally available for purchase — and let’s keep our fingers crossed that it will also reach our regions.
Dual-sensor and up to 12x zoom for the new Xiaomi AI IP Camera
Xiaomi Smart Camera 4 Max AI Zoom Edition uses a dual-camera setup consisting of a 12 MP telephoto lens and an 8 MP wide-angle lens.
The system offers lossless zoom up to 3x and hybrid zoom up to 12x, along with automatic focus. The pan-tilt structure allows the camera to rotate 360° horizontally and 180° vertically, thereby covering a particularly wide area.
For night monitoring there are also ten integrated infrared illuminators, enabling continued use of the device even in low-light conditions.
Artificial intelligence at the center of it all
One of the main novelties is the introduction of what Xiaomi calls its first major AI model dedicated to home assistance. The system is designed to monitor children, the elderly and pets, analyzing recorded videos to derive information about their activities.
The camera can, for example, track children’s progress in their studies, monitor the situation of the elderly at home and monitor pets’ activities. The artificial intelligence can also generate daily reports covering multiple subjects simultaneously.
Xiaomi has also worked on the retrieval of recordings: Smart Camera 4 Max AI Zoom allows you to search inside the video history using textual queries, surpassing the traditional system that requires scrolling manually through the recordings to identify a particular event.
Recordings can be stored using three different systems: microSD card, cloud, or NAS.
More accurate person recognition
Under the hood sits a high-performance chip used to manage several AI features locally. Among them is the new algorithm Person Recognition Pro: the system does not simply recognize a person when the face is facing the camera directly, but also uses side views, back images and other body features.
According to Xiaomi, the new algorithm improves recognition accuracy by 20% and speeds up the identification of people.
Price and availability
Xiaomi Smart Camera 4 Max AI Zoom Edition is available in China at the price of 799 yuan, about €102 at the current exchange rate. At the moment it is the most advanced surveillance camera from Lei Jun’s company and would certainly be very interesting to have in Italy as well (keeping our fingers crossed for the future).
