Luxonis OAK-1 isn’t a standard USB camera.  It’s a 4-trillion-operations-per-second AI powerhouse that performs your AI models on-board, so that your host is free to do whatever you need it to do.  

Its integrated 12 MegaPixel camera module communicates over an on-board 2.1 Gbps MIPI interface directly to the Myriad X, which ingests this data and performs neural inference on it, returning the results over USB.

Such a data path offloads the host processor from all of this work.  In the common use case of object detection from a 12MP image, this means your host is now dealing with a 24 Kbps stream of what the objects are and where they are in the image, instead of a 2.1 Gbps stream of video.  So an 87,500 reduction in data your host has to deal with.

And such a reduction means that even on relatively-slow hosts, one can use dozens of OAK-1 without burdening the host CPU.

As an example, below is an example of running MobileNet-SSD:

OAK-1 + Raspberry Pi: 50+FPS, 0% RPi CPU Utilization

NCS2 + Raspberry Pi: 8FPS, 225% CPU Utilization