INDUSTRY FOCUS

Staying Focused on the Horizon

What a crazy ride we all experienced in 2020, and it seems were on that same roller coaster as we turn full force into 2021. With the publication of the March issue, it stirs my memory of the past 20-plus years of attending ISC West in Las Vegas.

One thing for certain, security never sleeps.

From memory lane, my first adventure at a tradeshow, I walked the floor somewhat crossed eyed and amazed. One experience that I’ll never forget is happening upon a very small both where Fredrik Nilsson of Axis Communications was hawking some new kind of camera. My lack of vision, I walked away from that conversation, thinking to myself, “that will never work.”

Wrong. I can’t even begin to explain how off base I was on this one.

Leap forward more than two decades, and our lead story in this issue, from Ray Cooke at Hanwha, details how Artificial Intelligence, “continues to gain momentum every day.” This will, according to Cooke, “make a substantial impact.”

I’m fully aware that if the mind can conceive a solution, it can also create a path to bring it to market.

Martin Gren. This Swedish innovator is the driving force behind the Axis Communications IP camera. Determined to share his vision, Gren brought the first IP camera to life (and it still works, I believe), many others have followed suit.

Now, we find the IP camera is more than capable of doing more than capturing video. AI has become a companion of the IP camera, the solution being stored on the edge of the camera and being used to monitor and manually search through vast amounts of video.

Once again, from Cooke’s cover story, “AI can help us not only watch continuously, but also feed systems that are able to sort, organize and categorize massive amounts of data in a way that human operators cannot. And, it can do so far more reliably than traditional video analytics ever did.”

One of many reasons AI works so well, defining characteristics of a detected object are captured in the image. Examples are the color of a shirt or trousers; whether or not a person is wearing a hat, glasses or carrying a handbag. AI takes hours off a manual video search of finding that man wearing a blue shirt and shorts.

What Gren and other started more than two decades ago has flourished. This proved to be a seminal moment in video surveillance and the security industry at large. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

This article originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Security Today.

About the Author

Ralph C. Jensen is the Publisher of Security Today magazine.

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