asmag.com had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Ekpanyapong and learn more about the Intellgent CCTV association and how AI technology is being implemented in video surveillance in Thailand.
Dr. Mongkol Ekpanyapong is an associate professor and Director of the AI Center in the Asian Institute of Technology. From his office in the institute’s green campus, he also serves as the president of Thailand’s Intelligent CCTV Association (ICA). The association’s vision for continued growth and wider recognition is translated into projects that help the ICA raise public awareness and gain support from key decision-makers to promote intelligent CCTV in Thailand.
asmag.com had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Ekpanyapong and learn more about the association and how AI technology is being implemented in video surveillance in Thailand.
“ICA was started about 8 years ago by the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), originally as a CCTV consortium. NSTDA wanted to form a consortium of CCTV companies bringing together government, private sector and academia to explore avenues of collaboration. After 3 or 4 years, once the alliance was more concrete we formed the association. The vision is to promote research related to CCTV, especially AI related work.”
“The AI center’s background is in computer vision, so there is a focus on CCTV. We are trying to move to other areas like medical or energy but a great deal of the research is still focused on security applications. The two advantages we have are our ability to customize solutions to local needs, and the ability to do local training on the scene itself, collect the data sets from the site itself to improve accuracy and not relying on online datasets for training,” added Ekpanyapong.
Previously, Thai highway authorities tried using commercial video analytics software to detect traffic violations, but encountered a lot of false alarms. “We were able to customize a solution according to their requests and reduce false alarms. Some traffic violations, like not wearing a helmet, are unique to Thailand, so domestic development is required to tackle the problem. Currently we are working on integrating AI into toll ways to detect anomalies and raise alerts (e.g. an object that falls on a lane, detect vehicles driving in the wrong direction etc.) We also provide the traffic breakdown analysis (vehicle breakdown, speed etc.). Another site where we work is Phra Phrom, the site of Four Face Buddhha; in this site we installed a system to do object tracking between cameras.”
Among the association’s goal is to help promote standards for video surveillance in Thailand as well as promote the use of domestically developed applications.
“We have about 20 member companies, as well as universities (Chulachomklao military academy, KU university, AI center at AIT) that are members and meet on a regular basis. The members take part in several working groups. We meet once a month and also have work groups that deal with different topics: standard definition team, working group for education. Working group for government relations,” explained Dr. Ekpanyapong.
The ICA’s standard team is working on creating a standardized approach to test and validate applications that will fit Thailand’s specific conditions. Currently it is working on two standards, the first one is for license plate recognition. “We try to identify and define testing condition and acceptance rate for LPR systems in different conditions like day/night or different speeds, since the Thai license plate is not a standard one like in other countries. The second standard we are working on is the face recognition – how to adapt the Thai Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) to facial recognition systems.”
The government relations group is responsible to connect with police, military and government units who are heavy users of CCTV for joint research projects or help address specific problems.
Looking into the future, Dr. Ekpanyapong still sees potential to grow the work of the ICA. “People are familiar with ICA because of our work on traffic violation detection. The pressing problems where we feel intelligent surveillance can bring added value is traffic in Bangkok and flooding. As ICA president, we try to make our work more public, so people know more about ICA, and try to reach the provincial governors and BMA. We still have to spend time to convince them of the necessity of ICA and its projects,” he concluded.
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