Using AI for Public Safety and Security

April 11, 2022

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Artificial intelligence is the driving force behind so many applications today. From the developers’ perspective, it’s almost a given that AI will play some role in the end application. One such application where AI is making a lot of inroads is public safety and security. Such security is being utilized in everything from airports and railways stations to hospitals and manufacturing facilities. And it can scale from a single room to a large campus or even a city.

Thanks to the advances in AI, it’s not out of the question to think “if it has a camera, it can be used for smart surveillance and smart monitoring.” And that’s exactly the thinking that’s taking place at AVerMedia Technologies, a leader in audio and video solutions, specializing in Edge-related products.

The benefits of smart surveillance are many. For example, you can quickly point out when unauthorized access is granted to a property. Without AI, the system would ping the administrator any time a person was seen. By using AI, you can filter out if that person is someone who should or should not have access. You can also decipher whether it’s a person, an animal, or a random object blowing in the wind.

Specifically, the Edge AI smart surveillance system can classify and detect humans and objects; detect crowd behaviors to alert for potentially unsafe situations and suspicious activity; and count people while performing facial recognition.

Safe and Secure

On the safety front, by have access to a slew of sensors, you can tell if the temperature is too high and why it is too high. You can tell if the room is too dark and why it’s too dark. You can tell if there are unauthorized people in a given room, and potentially who those people are.

Another big advantage to this technology is that, when working properly, it easily trumps the human in that it never gets tired, it never has a bad day or needs time off. And the AI-based systems can be far more accurate, taking past history into account.

The AVerMedia NX215B AI box PC is an example of a platform that can be used for smart surveillance and monitoring. It’s small enough to fit into just about any environment, yet powerful enough to run the required AI algorithms.

While all these conditions make the environment far more safe and secure, the implementation may not be so straightforward. That’s where a vendor like AVerMedia Technologies comes in. It’s solutions like the compact (126- by 96- by 74-mm) NX215B AI box PC (which was recently awarded Embedded Computing Design’s Product of the Week) are optimized for smart surveillance. Designed with the high-performance NVIDIA Jetson™ Xavier NX module, the NX215B delivers 21 TOPS of computing performance with the host running at 15 or 20 W and 14 TOPS at 10 W on the strength of a 384-core NVIDIA Volta GPU with 48 Tensor Cores and a six-core NVIDIA Carmel Armv8 CPU.

One of the keys to smart surveillance is being able to differentiate between what is real data and what is not—eliminating false positives and negatives. Accuracy rates must be well over 90% for the technology to be worthwhile. A key metric that’s at the disposal of the AI system is the back-end analytics, which is made up of data captured over potentially long periods of time. Such data can be stored in the Cloud and accessed by multiple people at geographies around the globe.

Not Without Its Challenges

One of the key challenges of smart surveillance systems is that they can potentially be hacked. We have learned over time that no system is 100% hack proof. There are measures that can be out into place to make it very difficult, but the bad guys are getting smarter and smarter. Keep in mind that such as system can be hacked anywhere along the network, even at a node that may be far down the line. And once the hackers are in, all bets are off. As a result, it’s imperative to stay on top of the latest hardware and software security measures.

Like the NX215B mentioned above, AVerMedia Technology has other solutions that it its customers scale their deployment, based on the specific application. For example, the AG411B  is aimed high performance applications. It’s designed with the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier module. With a fanless design, the thermally optimized housing can handle operating temperatures of -10°C to +60°C while running virtually silent. And then there is the NO111B, which is similar in features to the NX215B for space-constrained applications, but contains NVIDIA’s Jetson NANO Version B01 module.

The benefits that come with partnering with AVerMedia include access to its rich partner ecosystem that includes all relevant aspects of hardware and software. And as seen, the solutions are flexible, reliable, and market-ready.