Perimeter detection? IST has a solution

HONOLULU—As part of an the ongoing ACAMS (access control and monitoring system) project here in the city and county of Honolulu, Integrated Security Technologies has been asked to do a lot of things: stream cameras in public areas back to the police station, put access control on a large portion of the area's critical infrastructure, get the credentialing and intercom systems set up. But one of the hardest tasks has been outdoor, evening, perimeter detection.

Now IST owner Andrew Lanning thinks he's got a solution that works. “I'd call it 100 percent,” he said, “but I hate to call anything 100 percent.” Using Flir's thermal cameras and a combination of analytics from BRS Labs and Pivotal Vision, Lanning said the company has a solution that will “revolutionize outdoor motion detection ... I can reject a dog and alarm on a person. We're very happy.”

He said the application is in a downtown area, but away from most residences and businesses so that there shouldn't really be people in the area at night. The area being protected is well defined, and where they're concerned about intrusion is very specific.

“If you design the app properly, a lot of this stuff can work,” Lanning said of video analytics that have been oft-derided. “They're selling a story that I've never seen work reliably—not enough to be useful.”

Not that he was instantly sold on its capabilities. “In the test scenario, we didn't get years and years of data,” Lanning said, “but I tried to fool it. I tried to break it. And when I couldn't do that, we went forward. The city has allowed us to do beta deployments on their system, and as long as we test it here at the lab first, they're willing to have a good relationship with us. They're fans of technology.”

What of BRS Labs' vaunted learning technology? “It just takes a little time, but it just keeps getting smarter,” Lanning confirmed. “It's going to give me people, I know that, and I'm quite confident that it's going to reject cats, dogs, maybe a pack of dogs. We'll drill down to reject anything that doesn't have enough pixels. We do have little itty bitty thieves out there, these little guys, and I'll have to go small enough that a guy like that can't get in, so a 160-pound dog or something might alarm.”