In recent years, the spread of video surveillance and the applications in which it is used have grown exponentially, both in the public sector - just think of the monitoring of large urban areas, traffic management or the recent anti-Covid applications - and in the private sector. Quantitative growth, which is also technological and qualitative: the new potential and the "intelligence" of today's systems are in fact applied in more and more contexts and lend themselves to customized solutions for every type of need.

As Alessia Saggese, Sales & Marketing Director of A.I. Tech told us: “In the IoT era, a camera becomes a smart sensor with more varied areas of application. These range from detecting intrusions or abnormal behaviour related to loitering (AI-INTRUSION), detecting abandoned luggage (AI-LOST), reporting falls (AI-SPILL), to early detection of fires through flame and smoke detection (AI-FIRE and AI-SMOKE). The Smart City is another of the areas of greatest use, allowing the intelligent monitoring of pedestrian flows (AI-CROWD-DEEP) and vehicular flows (AI-TRAFFIC); the detection of abnormal situations, such as accidents, congestion, traffic violations (AI-VIOLATION); the intelligent management of parking (AI-PARKING), so as to immediately direct the citizen to a free parking space, with a significant saving of time and lower emissions. In the retail sector, smart video surveillance has also become a way to get to know one's own sales area and improve it: one can analyse the number of people entering the store (AI-PEOPLE), estimate the most or least crowded areas through a heat map mechanism (AI-HEAT), intelligently manage the tills through queue monitoring (AI-CROWD) or even target customers by recognizing their gender, age, ethnicity and sentiment (AI-BIO)".

But the relationship between man and technology is also changing: thanks to intelligent on-board systems, cameras are now able to interact in a smart way with operators, reducing false alarms and automatically reading and archiving data collected, thus improving final results and the quality of work itself.

"Thanks to the feedback we've received from our customers, it's clear that with systems equipped with artificial intelligence it is possible to reduce the workload of operators. A practical example is neural networks trained for perimeter video analysis that forward only verified events to the control centre. This results, for example, in fewer false alarms and therefore greater efficiency. Video analysis applications such as people counting also provide valuable data to management systems. At the level of application contexts, at present, we are witnessing strong demand, especially from the industrial world, for perimeter scenarios, and from the port sector” - Andrea Bigliardi, Business Development Manager at Dallmeier Italia, told us.

Donato Preite, CTO of Crisma Security, added: "We have been involved in Intelligent Physical Security since our founding in 2013. An intelligent video surveillance system is an active system that automatically detects a threat and alerts security guards, and can discriminate between real and false alarms. In order to transform a 'traditional' surveillance system into an 'intelligent' one, we have developed a technology, called ‘IntelliDetect’, which, using Artificial Intelligence algorithms, is able to transform a passive video surveillance system into an active protection system, allowing the reduction of more than 90% of false alarms and inserting localization and tracking features of targets on a map, simplifying the task of operators in a Control Room".

"The transition from pixel-based video analysis, better known as motion detection, to intelligent video analysis is, in my opinion, an epoch-making turning point" - stated Andrea Bernini, Sales Director of Provision-ISR Italia - "Provision-ISR artificial intelligence includes face recognition, object recognition and license plate recognition devices. This is a range of solutions across all vertical markets: from retail to entertainment, from industrial to banking, including residential, hotels and transport".

THE QUESTION OF PRIVACY

Talking about smart solutions inevitably involves the management and protection of sensitive data. This is an important issue, which entails responsibilities for the entire supply chain, from producer to end user, in which the producers themselves are committed.

"It is always difficult to make guarantees as a manufacturer, because it depends on how end users use their video solutions in practice. However, thanks to our 'Made in Germany' strategy, we have the entire supply chain under control and can therefore implement GDPR 'Security & Privacy by Design' guidelines in all our components. In addition, we provide our partners and customers with comprehensive documentation, as well as best practice guides and implementation guidelines that go well beyond simple functionality. This enables them to fully comply with country- and application-specific regulations" - states Andrea Bigliardi, Business Development Manager at Dallmeier Italia.

"If by 'data protection' we mean the ability to protect data from unauthorized access, by 'data privacy' we refer to the ability of a user to decide who can access their data and for what purpose. At Provision-ISR, we hold both categories sacred and have always invested enormous resources in developing algorithms that allow us to protect sensitive user information. Amongst implementations in progress we can announce that our devices will soon have a single 'administrator' who will be able to share or stop sharing a device in use with other users through the APP Provision Cam 2" - Andrea Bernini, sales director of Provision-ISR Italy, said.

"All technologies offered by Crisma Security are natively compliant with the security standards required for a next-generation active video surveillance system. In the most complex projects, related to the protection of critical infrastructure, we support Data Protection Officers to ensure that the management and protection of their data is done correctly" - added Donato Preite, CTO of Crisma Security.

“A.I. Tech is very attentive to issues related to data management and protection: all applications and services allow data access and application transfer through the use of secure and standard protocols. More in detail, the HTTPS protocol is used to access applications: the user can easily customize the certificates to be used in order to be certain of the identity of the device with which he/she is communicating and the confidentiality of communications. In addition, event notifications can be sent via secure protocols such as HTTPS, SMTPS and SFTP. Also, in this case notification mechanisms towards third party systems are configurable by the user who can choose the desired channel security level, for example password protection or password and certificate (where supported by the protocol). In addition, all data is collected anonymously, ensuring anonymization and pseudonymization. The video stream is in fact processed in real time and the information stored and transferred cannot be traced back to people or objects in the scene. In short, the data can be minimized according to the principle of privacy by design and by default, as only that which is necessary to achieve the purpose for which it is handled will be processed" – stated Alessia Saggese, A.I. Tech Sales & Marketing Director