The arrival of Artificial Intelligence in the electronic security industry is a reality. Let's know how the market should adapt to this technology.
Vivid Gu*
Before the new garbage sorting regulations went into effect in Shanghai on July 1, Shanghai residents had no experience in this matter and are still confused by the complicated garbage sorting standards. To solve this new point of those who live in or visit Shanghai, they say companies are developing smart trash cans that are smart enough to identify the types of garbage through information gleaned from the camera and sensors.
That's just a glimpse of life powered by the Internet of Things (IoT), which can benefit us greatly. The city, the traffic, the home, none will be as safe as we know it if, for example, a wanted man shows his face, but is not identified, an alarm is not activated and a warning is not sent to the police in time.
While it's a buzzword in the tech world for many years and an even hotter topic today that permeates the conversations of the laity, IoT is now literally a big deal. The global market was valued at $190 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $1111.3 billion by 2026, according to a recent Report by Fortune Business Insights, titled Global Market Analysis, Outlook, and Forecast, 2019-2026. Analysts in the report predict that the global market will expand at a fierce CAGR of 24.7% over the forecast years.
AIoT rises
The rise of IoT requires multiple advanced technologies, including 5G, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, with artificial intelligence being the most important. Therefore, now IoT is often referred to directly as Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), perhaps a more accurate term, as it is not only about connecting things/machines, but also about connecting things/machines that are smart enough to operate on their own, quickly and spontaneously, when you get to work on a complicated system, as a security system.
AIoT's intelligent security solutions not only save human power, but in various ways outperform man's work. Security cameras, for example, are sharper eyes than security guards when connected to the database. Every day, a large amount of visual information is collected by high-definition cameras and transformed, through the advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm, into structured data, which can be calculated and compared. In this way, AIoT makes it possible for cameras to not only record what a person does, but also recognize who that person is right away.
In addition to the convenience and efficiency of subsequent cross-checking, the AIoT security system can also deal with emergencies when or even before they occur. In short, it expands protection to prevention through pattern analysis. Since the cameras are connected to other devices in AIoT, such as the alarm ring and access control, the security system is endowed with power to take action according to the information collected and analyzed.
Today, cameras often work with various types of sensors that can provide instant information in addition to images and videos, such as temperature and humidity, which are crucial for the safety of places like museums, pharmacies, and farms. And as you can see, AIoT solutions, in those cases, will also simultaneously take care of these situations by automatically adjusting the corresponding equipment, such as the air conditioner and humidifier.
AIoT and Smart solutions in the security industry
In more complex situations in which there are more variables, AIoT, although still far from replacing most human work, offers great help in terms of saving time and cost, reorganizing resources to the most efficient degree, resulting in several smart solutions such as Smart Cities, Smart Traffic, Smart Store, Smart home, etc.
Today's city is generally a very complicated organism consisting of many elements and departments that, if not connected in the most efficient way, could handle neither the unexpected event nor the daily operation. Since the police force and other human resources are limited, it is critical to use them intelligently, so AIoT-backed Smart Cities solutions become inevitable.
The smart city concept was first proposed by IBM in 2008. Since then, countries begin to develop smart city projects around the world. But the city is a complex and huge system in which it is impossible to realize sustainable development overnight. Different cities have their own unique characteristics and spatial designs due to differences in the level of economic development (political system and culture), which make the pattern of success unrepairable. For example, São Paulo is the largest industrial city in Brazil, and Hangzhou is an e-commerce hub in China, we can't just apply the same solution to these two cities.
With its rich experience of hundreds of smart city projects, in 2018, we introduced a concept called "Dahua Heart of City (Dahua HOC)" based on the 1+2+N architecture. "1" refers to a Big Data platform. All data at the city level will be integrated into this Big Data platform for intelligent analysis. "2" means two centers: operation and management center and security center. Based on this architecture, Dahua Technology can serve "N" applications for the development of smart cities. For example, safe city, smart traffic, smart banking, smart industrial park, etc.
The same real-time information that is collected and shared also applies to the Smart Transportation Solution. For example, many cities around the world suffer from insufficient parking spaces. In China, there were 80 million parking spaces, but 50% of which had not yet been used or were empty, according to a report jointly published by the China Business News Business Data Center (CBNData) and the ETCP Smart Parking Industry Research Institute.
If, through AIot Smart Traffic Solution, the real-time information collected and the big data from various departments shared and analyzed and the resources reorganized accordingly, it is estimated that the vacancy rate could be reduced to 10%, which would be of great help for urban traffic control. In addition to parking, many other complex traffic scenes are in great need of AIoT solutions, such as buses, road traffic, airport, port, subway, etc. The brand's smart solutions have been applied to the port of Yarmouth in the UK, the Recife metro in Brazil, Ulaanbaatar city road in Mongolia, etc.
Certainly, smart AIoT solutions can also be adopted by the private sector, such as Smart Retail Solution, which, for example, can automatically calculate the flow of customers using security cameras that can distinguish people from objects and funds and thus optimize employee scheduling. With more information, the store can make smarter business decisions.
And there are solutions for the smart home. While security may still be the top priority for family users, it won't be the only value. Smart Home Solution makes cameras do more than surveillance when connected to other parts of the house via AIoT, such as the lock and phone. Users can remotely authorize other people to enter simply through the cell phone. And the recorded video will not only refer to safety, but also to entertainment purposes, such as watching your pets live.
AIoT vs. Cyber Security
The advent of the AIoT era has brought unprecedented attention to network security and privacy protection.
On May 25, 2018, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially implemented to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union, imposing stricter requirements on data processing by controllers and processors. Companies around the world, including security vendors, took several active steps, such as conducting data protection impact assessments, strengthening data protection training, updating data protection technologies, and standardizing organizational compliance requirements.
As a result, the business of third-party certification companies is booming globally. To minimize the negative influence of GDPR on their businesses, companies such as Dahua Technology, Hisense and Deutsche Telekom have been actively working with companies such as TÜV Rheinland, ensuring that their related products and services comply with IoT data security and privacy protection, requirements derived from GDPR.
More players: challenges or opportunities
An analogy with AIoT could be water: it's pretty much everywhere, it's all about everything, and it's essential to life as we know it or as we ask it to be. Not surprisingly, the security industry, which tries to protect life itself, is one of the pioneers in exploring AIoT technologies and, as a result, one of the first to benefit from it. Driven by AIoT, the security industry sees ambitious new players entering the game from the telecommunications, IT, AI or chip manufacturing industries, such as Huawei, Alibaba, Sensetime, Megvii, etc. The battle for the billion-dollar market in the very near future will, in fact, be an all-out war with many front lines.
For more traditional players who have gone through two major transformations of the security industry, first from the hardware manufacturer to the solution provider and then to the platform operator, the new era, once again, brings more challenges and more opportunities.
The main challenge is to integrate data, due to the lack of high-level design and the immaturity of technologies, the data is isolated from each other at different stages, such as collection, storage, processing and application, resulting in an information silo and fragmentation of data.
The opportunities for traditional gamers are based on the competitive advantage in audio/video technology and core intelligent algorithms. The sheer number of videos produced every day are important data sources if they can be calculated through artificial intelligence.
The evolution of AIoT for the security industry has arrived, but it still has a long way to go. At the current stage, AI has more to do with advanced perception, but it is expected to be an advanced brain that can handle very complicated situations. That said, it's a consensus of major players that AI would be the gold mine in the industry. Like each and every golden rush in human history, the biggest winners of the AIoT era are probably the most experienced and the bravest.
*Vivid Gu is the Senior Marketing Officer of Dahua Technology.
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