Ready to implement analytics? Beware of additional costs.

Leveraging analytics is not a new concept to School Resource Officers (SRO). Many are aware of the communicated benefits of improved reaction times and increased situational awareness. Early camera analytics would require additional expensive servers to process and make sense of the video feed, and it was often riddled with a new challenge for SROs to contend with — false positive results. For example, SROs may be alerted to investigate motion detection of a garbage bag blowing around on a windy day by a restricted door. The unfortunate result of false positive results is that the analytic is deemed unreliable and is no longer used, resulting in wasted budget.

Enter AI-enabled camera analytics, where with the help of AI, false positives are virtually eliminated. This is because i-PRO’s AI algorithm is able to distinguish between humans, vehicles and bicycles. In the previous example, a moving garbage bag would not trigger an alert because the AI would detect the garbage bag and know it was not a human, vehicle or bicycle and therefore would not alarm. With the increased accuracy in analytics resulting from AI-enabled technology, school administrators can better allocate their resources since SROs will spend less time responding to false positives. Augmenting AI to help verify security incidents can help schools to move towards a proactive security stance. 

During a security incident, time is critical, and seconds can count in mitigating negative impacts. The i-PRO Active Guard plug-in is a powerful analytic that enables a more proactive security stance. The plug-in combines deep learning technology with our i-PRO cameras to search for images in real time using a variety of external attributes. For example, i-PRO Active Guard can identify all individuals wearing a red shirt in a specified time frame and once located, a notification can be sent to the field security officer. Post-event searches are another important aspect of school security programs, and many schools devote several resources to monitoring captured footage. With i-PRO Active Guard, post-event search becomes an easier task reducing the time to find the event in question from hours to minutes. With processing occurring at the edge, i-PRO AI cameras combined with the Active Guard server eliminate the need for additional analysis servers, helping schools maximize security budgets.

Understand the total cost of ownership with your analytics implementation. 

Processing at the edge is a game changer for saving on expensive analytics servers and for enabling a proactive, real-time security posture. i-PRO AI-enabled cameras process metadata at the edge. This means our cameras are collecting information or attributes about the images, such as the number of humans, colors of shirts, pants and shoes and processing the metadata within the camera. This is very different than traditional analytics where the camera sends the image back to the server for processing. The major benefits of processing the metadata at the edge are twofold. Firstly, the response times can be improved because the time to process the data into actionable information is reduced since the metadata is being processed on the camera. Additionally, because the processing of data is on board the camera, there is no need for an additional server to process the analytics. The result is a seamless and light-weight solution that can be easily implemented on an existing VMS that is ready to upgrade to i-PRO AI-enabled cameras.