Video Security Becomes Anonymous 

Alongside the pandemic, the health and safety of passengers have become a top priority across airports. Advantech’s technology provided the foundation to develop a smart surveillance system that anonymizes data 

With millions of passengers that travel daily, airport safety and security have become a challenging issue. Furthermore, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health and hygiene of passengers are essential factors in the operation of an efficient transportation system. Therefore, new regulations have necessitated smart and efficient technological solutions to improve the safety of passengers and airport workers. An example includes the use of video security to monitor through the use of current surveillance camera systems to automate digital visual inspections. Thanks to the AI solution such as automated crowd monitoring and social distancing, it is possible to quickly improve the public health and safety. Most of the video facility services are all connected to the airport security dashboard, such as fire alarms and trolleys. However, some regions and local authorities, such as the European authority, prohibit the use of surveillance video footage. Therefore, such solutions affect legal compliance with the health and safety regulations, even affect the efficiency of the current security system on real-time asset monitoring. An alternative solution entails a smart anonymization surveillance system: it anonymizes real-time data, and provides useful insights from the video data. These solutions foster compliance with the health and safety regulations, while decreasing costs and increasing the quality of service.  

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The project’s protagonists 

The project involved conceptualizing a smart solution for BrainCreators and Bosch Energy & Building Solutions. BrainCreators is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company that builds digital inspectors for faster and more consistently visual inspections, removing costly bottlenecks from core processes by automating repetitive tasks. Furthermore, BrainCreators has a BrainMatter platform, which is used to train and employ digital inspectors as turnkey cloud or on-edge solutions. BrainCreators is also one of the strategic ecosystem partners of Advantech. In addition, as part of the Bosch company, Bosch Energy & Building Solutions provide safety and security solutions with a strong focus on control rooms. It also provides connected and integrated solutions to make buildings more secure, comfortable, and efficient. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on air transportation globally, BrainCreators and Bosch Energy & Building Solutions sought new methods for reforming automation, aiming for real-time asset monitoring, automated crowd monitoring and social distancing. 

How does the system work? 

The smart solution entails Advantech’s MIC-770 Compact Fanless System with 8th Gen Intel® Core I CPU. The data was initially processed at BrainCreators’ data center, which is subsequently deployed on the Advantech MIC-770, which has an NVIDIA Tesla T4 Inference card. The use of multiple cards ensures scalability across multiple platforms. By doing this, the data captured by the Video Management System (VMS) could be analyzed, processed and anonymized in real-time ensuring airport management staff could use the footage. Additional benefits include the possibility to create a digital twin further adding versatility for a wide range of applications: asset monitoring, accurate tracking, people counter, mask detection, luggage cart finder and unattended luggage detection. These factors will also save staff costs, area scanning costs for fixed assets (e.g. light fixtures, trashcans, sprinkler installations) and will enable the effective use of third parties (e.g. cleaning companies). As a result, Advantech’s mature IPC and Edge AI technology effectively provided BrainCreators and Bosch Energy & Building Solutions the foundation to conceptualize a solution that comprised a smart video surveillance system. All this while ensuring compliance with current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the EU Government.