iCetana: AI-assisted Video Surveillance System

Over the last few years, the proliferation of video surveillance has been tremendous and has left an indelible imprint in shaping the security industry to a whole different stratosphere. The advancement in technology has supplemented human judgment and has helped security officers to garner better outcomes and improve their security portfolio. Chris Farquhar, CEO, and Director of iCetana underlines the same and mentions how his firm brings an AI assisted video surveillance system for shopping malls, college campuses, logistics and warehousing facilities, casinos and transportation hubs to detect and deter criminal behavior, and reduce risks across operations. With the iCetana system, the firm enables its clients to turn vast surveillance infrastructures into efficient live monitoring systems and pre-empt threats and risk from escalating any further.

The iCetana system leverages computer vision, machine-learning and a patented anomaly detection algorithm to detect the difference between abnormal activities and normal motion patterns. This advanced AI infused system minimizes the problem of massive video surveillance data overload by only showing the video scenes where unusual activity is occurring, activities associated with crimes and other public safety issues. As the surveillance operators can identify the unusual events in real time, they can immediately initiate a response. The real-time identification of unusual patterns renders actionable insights to the security officers along with the prowess to aggregate local, regional and global surveillance trends.

“One of the key distinctive features of this system is that it can intertwine with the existing video surveillance infrastructures of an organization and therefore organizations can maximize the benefits of their existing systems and investment,” says Farquhar. The AI assisted iCetana system has served the needs of various clients and has helped them to improve the security in campuses, transportation, shopping malls, and smart cities.
Referring to one of the projects Farquhar explains how the firm assisted a shopping mall operator in managing their risk environment in all their shopping malls based in the Middle East and North Africa. The retailer had installed more than 10,000 cameras across all its malls to safeguard its critical assets and ensure a safe and secure environment for consumers visiting the malls every day. But, as large numbers of consumers were visiting the malls daily, the mall operator was facing the challenge of monitoring all the cameras and responding to unusual events in real time. “We assisted the mall operator to respond to key events seen in their malls in real time and effectively manage all their security operations,” he adds. In one of the other associations, iCetana helped a San Diego based university to do AI-based video surveillance to monitor their campuses which has thousands of people and students visiting the campus every day. With the association, the university was able to identify key events effecting campus security and safety in real time.

Apart from boosting the security infrastructure, video surveillance has also been used for improving decision making across businesses. Today, using AI-assisted video intelligence companies can leverage their video surveillance infrastructure for health, safety, operational and production compliance. They can detect incidents related to unsafe work practices, those that violate base operational controls and those that reduce the throughput of production systems. For example in a manufacturing industry, video intelligence can be leveraged to examine operations and respond to specific issues to improve efficiency and productivity. Farquhar further mentions that AI has changed the face of video surveillance and industries are now leveraging video intelligence to garner better results across security, health and safety, operations and production. “We are very much focused on video intelligence to improve the safety and security of our clients and help them to improve day-to-day decision making for better operational and production intelligence,” he concludes.