Large vision-language models are powerful but expensive. Here is how a layered architecture keeps real-time video understanding fast and affordable.
The cost problem
Applying a large multimodal model to every frame from every camera quickly exhausts any reasonable compute budget.
A layered approach
Lightweight models index scenes continuously; heavier reasoning is reserved for the moments that are actually relevant to a query or alert.
- Continuous lightweight indexing
- Query-time re-ranking
- Selective deep reasoning