A good sign of Philippines’ security is it’s moving towards smarter technologies that help the end user prevent, mitigate or monitor an event or a threat. Law enforcement, for example, can benefit from body-worn cameras equipped with various advanced features as officers combat crimes or engage criminals. “We've got
A good sign of Philippines' security is it's moving towards smarter technologies that help the end user prevent, mitigate or monitor an event or a threat. Law enforcement, for example, can benefit from body-worn cameras equipped with various advanced features as officers combat crimes or engage criminals.
“We've got a lot of body worn cameras with GPS functions so the command center will know where the enforcers are. It has two-way audio so you can communicate with your command station; once you push an SOS button the command center will know you are in trouble. All your operations are recorded and live,” said Matthew Ang, Product Manager at ISR.
Video surveillance, meanwhile, is also used more and more as a preventive measure rather than a forensic tool after something happens. This has become more possible with advances in video analytics. “What the end user is asking for today is … to mitigate crime instead of investigating crime. There are different products that can fit into that demand, whether it's LPR or face recognition,” said Magnus Zederfeldt, Regional Director for South Asia Pacific at Axis Communications. “The Philippines is really investing in a good platform from the start. They are smart in the sense in that they are investing in a good platform for future applications.”
Analytics performed on recorded video can help with smart search, something that vendors have received lots of inquiries about. “So if I want to find a blue-colored car crossing the line I can just select, and the system will show me only those video matching my criteria,” said Durairaj Gireraj, Director for Asia Pacific at Axxonsoft. “Imagine you have two weeks or months of data, you cannot manually do a playback, but this allows you within seconds to fetch your data.”
Lately, Filipinos are also trialing IoT solutions, installing sensors and data points to gather and track data. “Slowly, the Philippines is going towards IoT. We had a government project for document management and tracking that's actually an IoT project,” said Ranil Reyes, Sales Supervisor at Internet of Things. “There are sensors within the vicinity of the office so you can track where the document is.”
Hotels, in particular the higher-end ones, are using this technology to track, for example, misplaced properties. “Each of the guest keycards has its own tracker device that will allow the security officer to locate the keycard if it so happens that the keycard is misplaced somewhere outside the premises. We have ways to track it,” said Roy Calimlim, Account Manager at Visible.
Finally, the Philippines is now learning to use security in non-security applications to enhance management efficiency. This is in particular noticeable in retail. “Some shopping malls are already starting to use people counting and others. Today CCTV is moving beyond security into operation and marketing, and there is a big need for age and gender analytics because they need to have the demographics – they want to know what type of people are visiting their premises and how much time they spend in each of the strategic locations in the area, so we see a big need in them,” said Gireraj.