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CheckVideo: Solving Summertime Pool Trespassing

Many apartments, condominium communities, and neighborhoods have community pools, often attached to a gym, sauna, or other such facilities. These areas can be a major source of liability for the HOAs that maintain them, and although they are generally locked in some way with a set of posted hours, trespassing is still common. There is a reason that so many of the videos demonstrating security products feature a clip of a pool break-in being foiled, that reason being the unusually high prevalence of trespassing. While there are a number of possible ways to tackle this issue, with varying degrees of success, here we will look at a solution that we recommend and have implemented in these settings before using gear from CheckVideo.

CheckVideo is a cloud based video hosting and monitoring system using off-site cloud storage. Using one or more cameras and motion detectors, a CheckVideo system is able to function during the day as general surveillance, providing the increasingly industry standard ability to check in on the property from a mobile device, while during closing hours operating as an alarm system with the capability to implement a siren or to quietly transmit footage to a monitoring center which can dispatch police if necessary.

CheckVideo features the same kind of analytics which are commonly employed in environments such as car lots, with software able to distinguish between a human presence and an animal, shadow moving, or other false alarm material. The system highlights human faces with a digital box and pushes that video to the phone of the user. It is a combination of analytics, the accessibility of mobile device connectivity, as well as the scalability of a CheckVideo system that makes it such a good fit for semi-public areas such as pools.

Finally, a unique feature for actually searching through your recordings is available in the app. It follows a format where the search parameters “what, where, and when” can be used to narrow down your search if there is a particular event that you are trying to locate. CheckVideo allows, for instance, a search for a “person”, in the “main entrance” between the hours of “X and Y”, which is really quite a next-gen way of going about cloud-hosted video storage and monitoring.

With no servers or on-site software needed, the ability to upgrade and integrate with existing cameras, as well as its overall usability and unique features make CheckVideo an ideal solution for security issues both great and small.

Security Technology of South is proud to offer integration of this service and custom solutions for any and all security needs. Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7

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Moving Access Control Into Interior Openings In Large Complexes

 

Technology exists in a co-evolutionary relationship with the people who use it. When technology evolves to become faster or smarter, the user follows. Innovations come to fill the gap in solving the end-users problems. Electronic access control follows this pattern as well. Where it was traditionally found surrounding the perimeter of a building and in specific high-risk areas, mostly due to cost limitations inherent in wired access control, the smart locks of today are often found deep into the interior doors of a building for applications that reach beyond simple security.

This is especially true for buildings that have more than 50 employees coming and going from the main doors each day. When large groups enter the building at the beginning of the day, RFID can be logged from a card carried by each person. It is possible to give varying levels of access to interior doors to different individuals, and of course to track movement and time spent in different areas. Interior access control gives advantages to both management and the general employee. Using wireless access control eliminates the need for maintaining sets of keys and keeping track of who has what and who may have accessed an area at some time. Employees have become increasingly use to swiping a key for access to their location. Basically, a cascading effect of adoption of interior wireless locks occurred over the last several years and in any serious installation it is almost guaranteed to be a major aspect of the project.

The same type of case can be made for K-12 schools, with the main entrance and secondary entrances being incorporated into the overall access control system. Using the correct hardware, a school can be setup to easily enter a lockdown of its entire perimeter. Once schools see these benefits, they quickly realize that incorporating the same locks into classrooms can allow for the lockdown of sections of a school to contain a crisis or protect from an external threat.

The evolution of this technology has reduced costs and improved reliability and performance, as well as the general capabilities of the systems. The differences in meeting the needs of a school versus an office, for instance, are where a security Integrator is able to come in and help the user decide between things like having real-time access to a wireless lock via a gateway in the school setting, versus perhaps going with a Wi-Fi connection in the office. This is not in real-time, but the office also has less need for the ability to go into quick lockdown to guard against an outside threat.

Variations like these in architecture allow for a mixing and matching of locks on interior and exterior doors to meet the needs of the customer. The demand for a “one-card solution” is already here, and increasingly users want and expect to be able to manage the functions of these systems through their mobile devices. As a Security Integrator, Security Technology of South Texas is prepared to build a tailor fit system for the needs of schools, places of work, car dealerships and more.

Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7

Intersection of AI, Drones, and 5G

The blogs on this site have taken multiple looks at these emerging technologies. Here, we will look at what a convergence of these three technologies may allow in the future of the security industry.
5G internet is of course not out yet, set to go into operation in the U.S. in the early 2020s, but once in place it is expected to provide mobile speeds of over a Gigabit/second. Because big data is the foundation of any AI, it is obviously critical to any drone security operation to have always on mobile internet with excessive speed. Better that than lagging video.
Drone tech has come a long way very quickly. They are highly maneuverable and have relatively long battery lives for the tasks they perform. However, in order to maintain a aerial security grid of autonomous machines to watch a city, equally advanced battery cell technology is also needed. The batteries made for modern electric cars are not too far off in terms of their weight/power ratio.
And now, the critical AI element. In the previous article we took a look at a research project that trained a drone to identify various violent poses (kicking, punching, shooting etc.). A project like this implemented across an entire city with multiple drones would need an incredibly robust AI underpinning the whole thing, one which would have been trained on a much wider range of images and video to be able to identify all kinds of trouble and also to anticipate it in advance.
The system might be combined with something akin to the modern AI driven service called “Predpull”, which uses old crime data to generate a daily map for law enforcement with boxes drawn around the zones that the AI thinks are more likely to see a crime take place that day. This service has proven itself effective in increasing arrests and dropping crime rates in the cities that have implemented it.
It is safe to expect systems like this to arise, because not only do they have a proven track record of working, but also because just like automation in every other field, the security drones would be able to reduce the amount of manpower behind them and eliminate the need for human surveillance in many cases.
Drones have already been equipped with AI trained on facial recognition from the top down, meaning that it is recognizing the contours of your scalp or hair to determine your identity. And so, unless the world economy collapses and we stop pursuing AI and drones, I fully expect to see this play out throughout the mid-late 2020s, and possibly sooner if we are talking about only being operational for big events or on certain days.
 Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7

Using Drones to Identify Violent Behavior in Crowds

 

The term “AI” is becoming a bit of a buzzword lately, but pairing it with drones to perform a specific task is exactly the kind of real-world application for which the kind of narrow AI that we have now is best suited. Reseachers used a drone to transmit video via 4G internet so as to allow real time analysis and processing. The algorithm, which was trained using deep learning, an AI approach used especially in image analysis, was taught to recognize 5 types of agressive poses.
For the purposes of the study, the AI was trained on strangling, kicking, punching, shooting, and stabbing. This was done by filming volunteers performing these acts in an exaggerated way. In the beginning, the volunteers are spaced apart, but move closer together over time.
The system reached a 94% accuracy rate, though that number dropped to 79% as the number of people in the frame was increased. The next step is of course to begin to train the system on real-life events. It is thought that in the very near future, systems like this will be used on a considerably larger scale to detect crime in public spaces and at big events. Inspired by the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017, the system’s developers believe that by actively watching for suspicious behavior in this way, terrorist attacks outdoors might be stopped in time.
Security Technology of South Texas does not offer still experimental technology, for now. Please contact us through email at admin@gostst.com on our website or via phone at  210-446-4863   24/7