Page 57 - Security Today, January/February 2021

"The good news is that you can invest in solutions you need today to help with social distancing, occupancy monitoring and face mask detection."
By KiChul (KC) Kim
The second wave is here, and people are tired of the pandemic as we head into what will most likely be a long, dark winter with COVID-19. Campuses of all sizes need to function at some level or risk an uncertain future. News of vaccines brings hope, but the reality is most people and organizations are going to be in vulnerable positions this winter. As a business or school struggling with lost revenues and unforeseen costs, it’s hard to be enthusiastic about spend- ing money on COVID-19 related protections and solutions when we hear that vaccines are coming. What will happen to big dollar COVID-19 capital expenses once the virus is in the rear-view mirror?
The good news is that you can invest in solutions you need today to help with social distancing, occupancy monitoring and face mask detection. Once the virus is behind us, these same technologies can take on new and additional roles to protect your campus from different threats while giving you actionable data on the day to day operations and man- agement of your organization. This is par- ticularly true with regard to the latest AI- technology inside security cameras.
These new cameras have evolved to become data sensors that record much more than images. AI cameras can detect objects such as people and vehicles. They can store attributes about those objects such as colors of vehicles or clothing, they can tell if some- one is wearing a mask or even if they’re wearing it incorrectly.
They can sense direction and count those objects. This makes them true data-gatherers which can give you enhanced insight about the flow of people and vehicles around your cam- pus. People are used to seeing security cameras in their daily lives, so they are an accepted and innocuous part of the world today.
When COVID-19 hit, companies scram- bled to come up with technological solutions to help, but it’s worth noting that intelligent AI-based cameras were really quick to evolve and step up to the task. They could be easily programmed to look for masks, since they already understood what a face and torso looked like. It was easy to accurately count people and warn when occupancy limits where reached in high traffic areas. This is because with AI (or machine learning), we
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