As global urbanization accelerates and populations significantly age, cities worldwide are investing heavily in smart city development. The goal is to create safer and more efficient urban environments through AI and digital technologies, enhancing citizens' quality of life. With the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLM) combined with generative AI, smart city applications have entered a new phase - enabling systems to automatically interpret traffic flow, pedestrian behavior, and unexpected incidents from video footage, and thereby supporting real-time decision-making.
In his keynote address ahead of COMPUTEX 2025 in Taipei, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted Kaohsiung's "Smart Kaohsiung Lighthouse Project," which leverages a VLM-based digital twin architecture to interconnect tens of thousands of city surveillance cameras, significantly improving the efficiency and service capabilities of the municipal government. The key technology driving this initiative comes from Linker Vision, a company renowned for its expertise in computer vision technology.
Joining the NVIDIA ecosystem to advance smart applications
With more than a decade of experience in AI-powered image recognition, Linker Vision has become a trusted partner for many leading global brands. Following the rapid rise of generative AI in 2023, the company began applying VLM's powerful visual comprehension and semantic reasoning capabilities to achieve a deeper understanding of real-world scenes.
Unlike traditional object recognition models, VLM can identify a broad range of objects without additional training while discerning contextual relationships among them. This enables the system to detect complex incidents and assess damage that conventional models often fail to recognize. Building on its solid foundation in visual recognition, Linker Vision utilizes VLM's multimodal data processing capabilities to develop a suite of solutions for smart city and smart factory applications.
Yi-Ting Liu, Senior Sales Manager at Linker Vision, explained that the company's smart factory solutions are designed to address enterprises' dual challenges of improving workplace safety and operational efficiency. In smart safety applications, the system can accurately detect fires, chemical leaks, or safety violations - such as workers entering restricted areas or failing to wear protective gear - and even identify complex behaviors like "smoking within a restricted zone," triggering composite alerts in real time. Beyond safety, the solution also monitors employee productivity, status, and compliance with standard operating procedures (SOPs), providing factory managers with a visualized, data-driven management tool that effectively reduces human error.
Building global presence through AWS
Linker Vision has built its solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for many years, achieving outstanding results in the smart city and smart factory domains through modular and standardized system architectures. Yi-Hsuan Lin, Product Manager at Linker Vision, noted that the company extensively utilizes AWS's AI computing power and services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) and tools to deploy and operate agents.
The key advantage, Lin said, lies in AWS's on-demand flexibility, which enables the team to access the latest GPU resources anywhere in the world, substantially reducing hardware procurement and maintenance costs. When conducting proof-of-concept (PoC) trials across borders, deployments can be launched instantly on AWS's local infrastructure closest to customers, eliminating the time and expense required for purchasing and installing physical hardware. Amid the global push toward Sovereign AI, Linker Vision also offers hybrid cloud and on-premises services, helping enterprises optimize AI models, develop tailored solutions, and ensure data privacy compliance.
Expanding internationally with AWS JIC support
Liu emphasized that participation in the AWS Joint Innovation Center (JIC) has laid a strong foundation for Linker Vision's market development and international expansion. Beyond providing abundant cloud resources and technical expertise, the JIC offers a comprehensive set of empowerment services, including business networking, corporate matchmaking, and marketing exposure, helping Linker Vision connect with strategic partners and accelerate business growth.
With rapid momentum in the Taiwan market, the company now aims to expand globally-targeting the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the United States-to capture the vast opportunities in smart city and smart factory development.
