Technology-wise, AI and deep learning-based video analytics still gather a lot of attention from US users. Cloud solutions are also popular, due to certain benefits they offer. However, with the coronavirus, covid-19-related solutions now dominate the security scene in the U.S.
Technology-wise,
AI and deep learning-based video analytics still gather a lot of attention from US users. Cloud solutions are also popular, due to certain benefits they offer. However, with the coronavirus, covid-19-related solutions now dominate the security scene in the U.S.
Body temperature cameras
With fever being a main symptom of covid-19, more and more US end users are turning to body temperature screening solutions as a way to protect staff against the disease. Against this backdrop, there’s a surge in demand for the so-called
thermal body temperature cameras, which have emerged from relative obscurity, seen mostly in certain airports, to must-haves at a range of end user entities.
“During this pandemic, US customers have been eager to deploy thermal solutions for temperature screening as a means to protect and enhance the safety of their employees and guests,” said Daniel Gundlach, GM for Critical Infrastructure at FLIR Systems. “Registered with the US Food and Drug Administration, FLIR’s non-contact thermal cameras are receiving strong interest from government agencies, airports and airlines, stadium operators, and large corporations such as factory, retail and campus environments.”
Contactless
Covid-19 is known to be spread mainly through respiratory droplets between people in proximity. However, viruses left by infected individuals on surfaces are also believed to be a means of transmission. That’s why
contactless technology has also gained popularity as a result.
“Studies have shown viruses can survive up to three days on the stainless steel and plastic platforms found in many fingerprint readers. That’s one reason we’re seeing increased interested in our contactless iris-based biometric solutions,” said Mohammed Murad, VP of Global Sales and Businesses Development at Iris ID. “The coronavirus has helped focus attention on contactless biometric technologies for identity authentication. I don’t see that changing soon.”
AI and Advanced Analytics
Aside from covid-19 technologies, video analytics based on AI and deep learning are also gaining momentum in the US market. It’s interesting to note that AI-based video analytics, long dismissed in the US as mostly hyped and overrated, are now getting more inquiries after their accuracy has been improved over the years.
“Today, organizations can look to intelligent video surveillance as a solution not only for their growing security challenges, but also for driving operational efficiencies, facilitating optimized guest and shopper experiences and optimizing business-wide decision-making with actionable intelligence derived from video,” said Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam. “We continue to build upon our video analytics platform with key capabilities that expand use cases for accelerating video investigations, attaining situational awareness and deriving operational intelligence.”
AI on the edge
More and more, the so-called “AI on the edge” concept has picked up momentum in the U.S., as end users benefit from advanced analytics that are run on the edge device such as cameras. “Compared to traditional systems that require a dedicated server to run advanced analytics such as face recognition, the newest AI SoCs enable similar AI performance locally while saving on total system cost (less video streaming, simpler servers),” said Jerome Gigot, Senior Director of Marketing for Video Security Products at Ambarella. “Neural network-based analytics are used at the simplest level to remove false alarms and then to perform functions such as face detection, recognition, tracking, license plate recognition, and vehicle make/model recognition.”
Cloud
For certain user cases, cloud is the ideal solution. Multi-site end users, for example, can benefit from a cloud-premise hybrid architecture, and small business/home users can benefit from a video surveillance-as-a-service business model, which eliminates the cost of servers and recorders. That’s why cloud remains popular as ever in the States.
Further, cloud can now play an even more critical role amid covid-19. “Adding in the challenges presented by global social distancing and isolation has provided an unfortunate but valuable test for many of the technological advances. Virtual remote surveillance for mission-critical infrastructure immediately comes to mind. This was already a clear trend, and one very well supported by cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. Now in a period where mandated lock downs are less the exception than the rule, the flexibility of these new distributed virtual networks demonstrates their value immediately,” said Andrew Elvish, VP of Marketing at Genetec.