May 12, 2026
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How IoT and Smart Devices are Reducing Urban Traffic Congestion

Urban traffic congestion is a headache for drivers in every city. Luckily, the use of IoT devices and smart technologies is helping traffic controllers mitigate road congestion through the use of smart traffic management systems.
Izvor: a&s International
E-mail: redakcija@asadria.com

In 2018, drivers in world’s most congested urban areas lost hundreds of hours to road traffic. In Bogotá, Colombia, drivers lost 272 hours per capita — the highest in the world — to road congestion, according to the 2018 INRIX Traffic Scorecard. Americans on average lost 97 hours in congestion, with Boston, Mass., topping the country at 164 hours — the city also experienced the greatest costs globally from congestion at US$2,291 a year.

Government initiatives for traffic management, however, are increasing as the drive for smarter and safer cities continues. This and hyper-urbanization in developing countries are major factors in the growth of traffic management solutions, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets. On the intelligent transportation system (ITS) side, MarketsandMarkets estimates the global ITS market will reach US$30.7 billion by 2023, up from nearly $23.4 billion in 2018.

From smart traffic signals to IoT devices, there is a clear rise in adoption of smarter, better traffic management solutions globally. At the same time, manufacturers of ITS and traffic management solutions are working hard to develop technologies aimed at easing urban traffic congestion.

IoT Developments Help Ease Urban Traffic Congestion

The internet of things (IoT) is helping traffic controllers around the world ease urban traffic congestion.

While there is no way to truly prevent congestion, the use of ICT and IoT solutions is enabling traffic controllers to ease it significantly. Todd Kreter, SVP and GM of Roadway Sensors at Iteris explained that in the past five to 10 years, the traffic industry had focused on “introducing the kind of sensors and connectivity that enables us to help public agencies with a rich set of data.”

Rapid development of ICT and IoT solutions offers new possibilities to increase the capacity of existing infrastructure, according to Bas van der Bijl, Manager, and Stefan Hjort, ITS Expert at Sweco. “Communication between road users and traffic systems, and also more and cheaper IoT sensors, provide more traffic information for the systems to optimize the flows,” they said. “It becomes also possible to guide road users around congested areas, dividing the load over the network more equally.”

Some companies have developed solutions focused on integration of smart, real-time traffic signal control with emerging connected vehicle technology — the radios that will be going into vehicles to enable direct vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. According to Stephen Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Rapid Flow Technologies, this integration provides additional opportunities for mitigating/reducing congestion.

“In the longer term, V2I communication will provide much more accurate sensing of vehicles approaching a given intersection, and hence lead to better optimization of traffic flows. In the shorter term, there are also mobility enhancements that can be provided,” Smith said. For the most part, the majority of traffic data comes from video and radar devices. Applying intelligent software algorithms to this collected data gives traffic controllers the tools to control congestion. For example, video outputs could help traffic controllers determine where cars are traveling, how fast they are going and what areas are most congested.

Using machine vision cameras to ease traffic congestion is one way to do this, explained Matthew Trushinski, Director of Marketing at Miovision. Machine vision can identify cars within video footage and count vehicle numbers. “Instead of a snapshot, traffic engineers can get a much bigger picture of how traffic is moving,” he said. Including this technology in smart intersections can allow traffic engineers to measure what is happening 24/7. Insights from this data can allow cities to make changes and measure the results, iterating until congestion measurably improves.

Urban Traffic Management Experts from Kapsch TrafficCom noted that traffic solutions deployed to measure, detect and respond relied on several sources, from widely used traffic sensors (e.g., loops) to specialized video processing, as well as FCD (floating car data) and also crowdsourcing (e.g., Waze). “IoT is mostly centered on highly distributed sensing networks or mobile devices, such as vehicles themselves that provide raw data to be processed for incident detection using time-series methods,” Kapsch TrafficCom said.

After detection, response plans can be selected from a pre-engineered library or built more dynamically according to recent available resources in the congestion area. In both cases, plans tend to reduce congestion by strategies such as information, rerouting and/or dynamic speed adjustment, according to Kapsch TrafficCom. While daily traffic congestion cannot be truly prevented, it can be controlled for planned events (e.g., roadworks, sports events, etc.), recurring situations (e.g., rush hour) or short-term forecasts. This is achieved by designing mitigating actions such as action plans that can be launched on-demand and automatically according to predefined triggers, explained Kapsch TrafficCom. “The more proactive traffic operators and systems can be, the less impact we can achieve.”

Smart Traffic Signals Make Intersections Safer, More Efficient

Smart traffic signals are becoming a regular part of urban traffic management, helping to make roads safer for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists.

Traffic signals are an integral part of keeping both drivers and pedestrians safe at intersections. As traffic control systems have become more intelligent, the use of smart traffic signals to optimize urban traffic flow has become increasingly important.

For decades, intersections ran independently using inductive-loop traffic-detection technology. However, the advent of internet of things (IoT) devices means more intelligent radar and video detection sensors that can count, measure direction and speed of travel, and also determine whether an objects is a car, bike or pedestrian. With this information, Todd Kreter, SVP and GM of Roadway Sensors at Iteris said “traffic engineers at a central traffic management center (TMC) can immediately modify signal timing, including how long a particular approach gets red or green, and then optimize timing throughout the day as traffic volume fluctuates.”More advanced smart strategies for traffic signals address highly dynamic changes in time durations for each and every movement within the intersection (cycle and split adjustments) and also across arterials (offset adjustments), explained Urban Traffic Management Experts from Kapsch TrafficCom.

Acquiring data for these adjustments can be done by using detectors (e.g., magnetic loops) or more advanced sensors, including video-based detection, and radar/doppler technologies. Additionally, advanced strategies are not limited to traffic counting, speed and occupancy measures. Adjusting cycle, split and offset in intersections in short intervals (e.g., 5 seconds) provides continued adaptation to varying traffic, and manages proactive adaptations, according to Kapsch TrafficCom.

Adaptive signaling regulation can be taken a step further with artificial intelligence (AI), using rules-based engines, machine learning or other AI capabilities, including recurring situations and also “human behavior,” to solve the most difficult situations, Kapsch TrafficCom said.

Rapid Flow Technologies’ Surtrac traffic signal system combines concepts from AI and traffic theory. The system allocates green time to different approaches at intersections in real time to optimize the movement of actual traffic on the road.

“The system puts computing at the edge (i.e., a computer at every intersection) to produce ‘signal timing plans’ in real time, collects information on approaching traffic in real-time from independent sensing devices (e.g., video cameras, radar, etc.) mounted at the intersection, and depends on real-time communication between networks to achieve network level coordination,” explained Stephen Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Rapid Flow Technologies. Sweco is developing Smart Traffic, a traffic light controller that utilizes data already available from traditional loop detectors along with new data sources like floating car data, cameras and radars. The data from its real-time and predictive traffic model is fused into a reliable image of the traffic on the level of individual vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians. Based on the predicted arrivals of traffic at the intersection, green phases are scheduled in advance optimizing both the duration as the sequence. Controlling traffic lights in this way results in reduced waiting times and CO2 emissions, according to Bas van der Bijl, Manager, and Stefan Hjort, ITS Expert at Sweco. “In addition it is also possible to inform road drivers about the scheduled green phases, offering the possibility to adopt their arrival speed at the intersection in order to prevent unnecessary stops and increasing the comfort,” they said.

Miovision offers a smart traffic signal platform called TrafficLink, which provides a range of solutions needed for a traffic team to collect, monitor and understand their traffic signals. The solutions include a managed cellular connection, and tools for signal monitoring, video streaming, maintenance alerts, as well as traffic data insights. Their SmartSense component brings traffic AI to the intersection, processing data gathered by its SmartSense 360 camera and enabling vehicle detection and ongoing studies of traffic, said Matthew Trushinski, Director of Marketing at Miovision.

In terms of solution implementation, there are many challenges when it comes to urban traffic signal control. One, according to Sweco, is finding the balance between optimal traffic light control and providing a reliable prediction of the future green phases to arriving traffic.

“The earlier drivers are informed about the signal changes, the harder it becomes to react to the actual traffic situation at the intersection,” Sweco said. They suggest using the latest sensor technology (e.g., intelligent cameras) in combination with predictive traffic models to make reliable predictions of the arrivals of traffic at an intersection for the next minute, making possible to optimize the traffic light control and to inform drivers about the scheduled green phases for the next minute.

Other challenges include pedestrian and bicycle detection. Effective traffic signaling in urban road networks must be able to distinguish different traffic modes (e.g., pedestrian, bicyclist, bus, passenger vehicle) and utilize this information in traffic signal control decisions, Smith explained. “Most current commercial vehicle detection devices are not capable of simultaneously detecting vehicles and pedestrians, and the option of using additional detection hardware to enable pedestrian detection is often not an extra expense that cities are willing to bear,” Smith said. The situation, however, is changing with more commercial detection companies introducing detection hardware capable of integrated vehicle and pedestrian detection.

How Everyone Can Benefit From Data Sharing of Real-Time Traffic Information

Sharing real-time traffic information across different agencies is the key to developing smarter traffic solutions.

Real-time traffic information is only available when traffic signals have a connection back to a central traffic management center. It is currently estimated that more than half of all signals are not connected, according to Todd Kreter, SVP and GM of Roadway Sensors at Iteris. Once connected though, agencies can access real-time traffic information through an advanced traffic management system in a variety of formats. They can then determine a signal’s status, as well as its diagnostic status.

With so many IoT devices being deployed for traffic management, the data being gathered is a gold mine for not only traffic controllers, but also other transportation and law enforcement agencies, as well as drivers. However, only when this data is shared can all parties reap the benefits.

Several solutions can address information exchange between agencies according to real-time needs and interagency agreements. Shared information can be achieved by using a shared data repository acting as a data hub, considering that agreed data is generated and consumed according to pre-agreed roles.

“Most or all agencies can also articulate an agreement for a shared ‘umbrella system,’ each one can already use such system for information dissemination and for coordination of actions across agencies,” said Urban Traffic Management Experts from Kapsch TrafficCom. They added the main challenges were defining agreements as firm as possible for consortia creations, building common platforms if agreed and intensive use of existing and future systems for the agreed goals.

Having data in standardized formats and an open architecture that avoids vendor lock-in are ways to avoid the challenges of data sharing, according to Matthew Trushinski, Director of Marketing at Miovision. His company believes in open architectures “to allow other city departments, third-party vendors and other partners to leverage the data generated at the street-level to make city life better.”

Bas van der Bijl, Manager, and Stefan Hjort, ITS Expert at Sweco, also noted that real-time open data would be used more and more. “Sharing information is the key to be able to develop smart solutions for the traffic in urban areas. When open data is available, the threshold for new solutions to enter the cities will be lowered,” they said.

Current developments in traffic management software are helping to facilitate better use of and sharing of collected data. “To effectively share information between city agencies, a common framework for representing city data is a prerequisite, and developing this common representation is the main challenge,” said Stephen Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Rapid Flow Technologies. For example, Surtrac currently provides an API for communicating real-time traffic information to a municipality — one of its current deployments is starting to tap into this data as part of their Open Data initiative.

Kreter explained how Iteris’ Signal Performance Measures (SPM) was being developed to make better use of the information provided by IoT sensing devices as well as by the traffic signal controllers. “This can provide information on vehicle volumes, speeds, locations, signal status, as well as bicycles and pedestrians and can provide multiple views of overall traffic signal performance,” he said. All this data, when shared, could significantly help various agencies improve traffic management.

Popular consumer navigation apps like Waze are also doing their part to share data. In April 2018, Waze signed a deal with Waycare, a traffic management startup, to bring “two-way data sharing” of municipal and road traffic data. According to a press release from Waycare, the collaboration will enable “cities and public agencies to communicate directly with vehicles on the road and to harness real-time in-vehicle data for advanced traffic management operations.”

Advanced Protects the Engineers of Tomorrow at One of Southern Europe’s Most Important Research Centres

Four networked MxPro 5 fire panels from global systems leader, Advanced, are now protecting one of Serbia’s most prestigious higher education facilities.

The project at the University of Belgrade’s School of Electrical Engineering, involved installing a fire system to reliably protect lives and property while respecting the value and authenticity of its 1920s features. This meant overcoming various problems presented by outdated construction methods, inaccessible areas and high ceilings.

Thanks to their performance, quality and ease of use, a network of three of Advanced’s 4-loop and one of its 1-loop MxPro 5 fire panels, including over 1000 Argus detectors, were chose to protect the entirety of this top educational and scientific institution, including the facilities of Civil Design, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering.

Advanced’s local partner in Serbia, TVI Ltd, was responsible for the design, installation and commissioning of the project. Electrical Engineer, Radomir Kerkez, at TVI Ltd, said: “The flexibility of Advanced’s fire panels to adapt to sites both large and small is what makes us choose them time and time again. Advanced products make even the most complex installation challenges straightforward and we can always rely on them to deliver complete protection.”

MxPro 5 is the leading multiprotocol fire system solution and was recently certified to the EN 54 standard by FM (Factory Mutual). It offers customers a choice of two panel ranges, four detector protocols and a completely open installer network, backed up by free training and support. MxPro panels can be used in single-loop, single-panel format or easily configured into high-speed, multi-loop networks of up to 200 nodes covering huge areas. MxPro’s legendary ease of installation and configuration plus wide peripheral range, make it customisable to almost any application.

Vladimir Zrnic, Advanced’s Regional Sales Manager for Southern Europe, said: “Our fire systems offer many ways to meet the challenges of protecting a building’s heritage features while providing robust and reliable fire protection. It is great to see that potential put into practice in yet another successful and prestigious site.”

Advanced, owned by FTSE 100 company Halma PLC, has a long history of protecting some of Europe’s most notable and prestigious buildings, including Athens’ Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia and Sofia’s Sofia University.

BIROSAFE Bulletproof Doors, Walls and Windows – EN 1522 – ECB•S Certified

DPTU “BIROSAFE” DOOEL Strumica is an engineering company founded in 2001. The company operates in the business of manufacturing, sales and installation of security, fireproof and bank equipment (security and fireproof safes, cabinets, doors, vaults, etc.).

BIROSAFE has offices and dealerships in all the Balkan countries and is present in the markets of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania, and Bulgaria.

BIROSAFE manufactures and offers different types of security equipment: safes, cabinets, deposit safes, weapon safes, cash transfer safes, vaults, vault doors, security doors, as well as fireproof equipment which includes safes, cabinets, doors, etc.

The products are usually made according to the standard measurements, but there is also an option to customize them based on the client’s demands.

In 2009, BIROSAFE became a member of the ESSA – European Security Systems Association, Frankfurt/Main (www.ecb-s .com).

European Certification Body (ECB) GmbH is an independent certification body for the EN 45011 standard. It issues the ECB•S certification mark which guarantees maximum security features in line with the European standards.
The ECB•S certified products guarantee quality and offer higher levels of resistance.

Since becoming a member of the ESSA, BIROSAFE has successfully passed the tests for several types of products and received the following EUROPEAN CERTIFICATES issued by ECB•S – Germany:
– EN 1143- 1 – for security safes and strong-room doors
– EN 1627 – for burglary resistant doors
– EN 1522 – for bulletproof walls, doors, and windows.
EN 1522 – bulletproof walls, doors and windows

Our bulletproof products offer bulletproof protection in line with the following standards:

– EN 1522 FB 4
– EN 1522 FB 4+
– EN 1522 FB 6

The bulletproof testing was performed at the renowned German laboratory of Beschussamt Ulm, under the guidance of the ECB-S team.

Each type of tested products was issued the ECB-S Certificate, which guarantees the level protection it is supposed to provide.

Consumers can recognize the recommended products by the blue ECB•S certification mark.

The BIROSAFE bulletproof doors and walls can be made with various measurements based on the client’s needs, and are available with or without bulletproof glass.

Customized manufacturing also applies to the aesthetic finish, which is available with several options, including metal, PVC and wooden covering (doors with PVC artificial leather – wood – plain color – aluminum – stainless).

Our bulletproof products can be built as Security Entrance Systems (SAS) which are designed for controlling entrances and exits in secure areas.

These Security Entrance Systems (SAS) offer security according to the EN 1627 security standard and are made bulletproof according to the EN 1522 standard.

Opening of the doors with Security Entrance Systems (SAS) is done with the interlocking system (one door opens – the second door closes). Interlocking doors grant entry or exit to a single person only, preventing unauthorized persons or intruders from gaining access. The users can enter through the first door, which locks itself just before the second door opens, allowing access to a secure zone.

There is also an option to build our bulletproof products as Security Desk Windows.

We strongly recommended these products to all the companies who are in the cash-in-transit business, banks, embassies, government institutions, exchange offices, etc.

The EN 1522 ECB•S Certified Bullet Resistant products offer quality and security in a single product. Purchasing those means investing in your safety, so you better invest wisely.

Securing beauty without ruining the view

With the seasonal inflow of a large amount of visitors, and revenue, popular resort cities need to make sure everyone has a great holiday, without being touched by crime. Balatonfüred, Hungary’s second most popular resort has over 1.5 million visitors (in 2016) flocking to its lake – the biggest in the country. The local police station looked to reseller WBS Systemhouse to provide a holistic surveillance solution for the city, and this was achieved by using Hikvision equipment.

Challenge
The whole area of the city needed to be covered, from the city centre to the border of the city covering the roads leading into the city and main traffic junctions, such as train and bus stations, locations preferred by tourists, walkways, entrances of beaches and bigger traffic junctions of the city. The city’s administration specifically needed to reduce the incidents of pickpocketing, shoplifting, car theft and breaking and entering.
Cameras needed to be positioned for maximum coverage, but they also needed to be placed sympathetically, to minimise any impact on the views and the beauty of the city – the reason for visitors to be there!
A particular challenge was the city’s railway station. Cameras were needed in the station lobby to ensure safety of passengers. However, the lobby was under renovation at the time, which complicated the installation. The cameras had to be fixed in a cavity covered with a suspended ceiling in a way that the casing was not affected.
The police department also needed to have a way to monitor vehicles to add to the security of the city and the safety of both residents and visitors.

Solution
WBS Systemhouse used 40 cameras around the city in strategic locations to offer maximum coverage. They chose PTZ Dome cameras (DS-2DE4220IW-DE) for their small, compact size, optimal resolution and zoom range. This meant it could provide the best pictures and range, while being unobtrusive to not spoil the beauty of the city.
The complicated installation in the station building was solved using a bracket (DS-1662ZJ) with a custom adjustment. The customer’s request was to ensure the camera’s mounting mechanism and the cabling was as ‘invisible’ as possible. This bespoke installation and the ability of the camera to deliver long range PoE power, resolved this issue to the delight of the customer.
The cameras are connected by a “closed-loop” wireless or optical fiber connection to the recording and Hikvision’s HikCentral video management platform installed in the server room of Balatonfüred Police Station. Camera images are recorded by 2 NVRs and a DVR, and the functions of the video management system are provided by iVMS 5200 (now called HikCentral) installed on a separate server. The WBS ANPR System installed on a separate server is also responsible for processing license plate data to check when vehicles entered and left the city, but also to have alarms on any ‘blacklisted’ vehicles that are picked up.
The feeds are monitored 24h at the police station in Balatonfüred, who are able to react quickly if necessary. The users find the system easy to use and flexible, thanks to the HikCentral and the fact that the cameras can easily be moved remotely.
László Regdon, Chief of Police in Balatonfüred, says: ““The area surveillance system has greatly contributed to the success of several traffic actions and criminal investigations by the police. Based on the system – which provides needle-sharp images – we have obtained useful information to provide evidence for various violations. Since the introduction of the camera system, the number of crimes has been reduced and the quality of events has been improved. The cameras in Balatonfüred fit into the atmosphere and environment of our small city, they do not create dissonance at all.”
This is a great example of how surveillance products can combine together to give an efficient, holistic system to cover a whole city. And, due to the choice of cameras, the quality of picture and the dedication of the installers, the solution quietly monitors the city and the people enjoying it without ruining the impact of the environment that attracts so many to it.

MOBOTIX and Hekatron Brandschutz: Innovative thermal cameras communicate with extinguishing systems to prevent fires in production

Things get hot when pots and pans are polished in the production process at Kuhn Rikon, the number one Swiss brand for crockery and kitchen aids. Dust explosions can easily occur if the temperature rises above a certain threshold, which in the worst-case scenario can lead to significant fire damage and production outages. Initiated by ITES GmbH, MOBOTIX and Hekatron Brandschutz teamed up in a joint project to deliver 360° protection against this risk for Kuhn Rikon. MOBOTIX thermal imaging cameras are connected to the fire alarm & extinguisher control center Integral IP at Hekatron Brandschutz. The cameras monitor the production process for critical temperatures and intervene autonomously in the production process. Not only does the system trigger an alarm in the case of possible overheating, it automatically stops the production machine and starts the extinguishing process where necessary.
Some years ago overheated polishing plates caused a dust explosion at the Kuhn Rikon main facility in Rikon in the Töss Valley of Switzerland, precipitating a devastating fire that destroyed the production system and parts of the factory building. “Luckily no-one was hurt, but the incident made us drastically aware that we urgently require reliable protection of our production processes that exceed the scope of normal fire protection,” explains Paul Brunschwiler, production technician at Kuhn Rikon AG.

MOBOTIX M16 thermal cameras: Tailored programming and ideal prevention
Project manager Mathias Stauffacher provided the convincing proposal of connecting the thermal cameras M16 Thermal by MOBOTIX with a fire alarm & extinguishing control center at the firm Hekatron Brandschutz: The M16 thermal cameras by MOBOTIX offer outstanding image resolution and enable precise monitoring of all danger zones within the Kuhn Rikon production workflow. In addition, the software package for the IP cameras allows tailored programming to suit the needs of the Swiss company. “We programmed all three escalation levels exactly: A warning for critical temperatures, production stop when the threshold is exceeded, followed by immediate initiation of the extinguishing process after the production shutdown to prevent any spread of the fire,” adds Stauffacher.

Kuhn Rikon: Significantly fewer production errors, production process boosted by 5%
“The compatibility with MOBOTIX and Hekatron Brandschutz, as well as the user-friendly and low-maintenance system, convinced us 100 percent”, reports Paul Brunschwiler.

“MOBOTIX and Hekatron Brandschutz have very similar DNA. Both our companies develop their technology and also manufacture their products in Germany. The clear focus on premium quality hardware, software and services is confirmed in the successful results of projects like this one,” emphasizes Phillip Antoniou, Sales Director EMEA at MOBOTIX AG. “The Kuhn Rikon project highlights the importance of a smart hard and software solution for fire protection and production optimization. Our intelligent safety systems make major contributions in other sectors as well, among them waste management or the petroleum and gas industries,” says Antoniou.

“The incident at Kuhn Rikon plainly shows that fire protection for technical systems is extremely important as a ‘life-insurance policy’ for the company. Here, protecting the employees and the company’s output go hand in hand,” stresses Daniel Triebswetter, specialist for extinguishing system control at Hekatron Brandschutz.

About MOBOTIX
MOBOTIX is a leading premium-quality manufacturer of intelligent IP video systems, setting standards in innovative camera technologies and decentralized security solutions with the highest cybersecurity. MOBOTIX was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Langmeil, Germany. Made in Germany, the company has offices in New York, Dubai, Sydney, Paris and Madrid. Customers worldwide rely on the longevity and reliability of MOBOTIX hardware and software. The flexibility of the solutions, the integrated intelligence and the highest level of data security are appreciated in many industries. MOBOTIX products and solutions help customers in industrial manufacturing, retail, logistics and healthcare, among others. With strong and international technology partnerships, the company is working on redefining the future.

About Hekatron Brandschutz
Ensuring the best possible protection of people and assets in emergency situations is and remains the driving force behind Hekatron Brandschutz in the area of fire safety for technical systems in Germany. Headquartered in Sulzburg in south Baden, the company has played a key role in shaping the development of fire protection equipment with its innovative products and services for over 55 years, while also accepting social responsibility and showing environmental commitment.

Perimeter protection – More than meets the eye

Perimeter protection is essential in critical infrastructures such as airports or utilities. Video analytics can greatly improve security in such environments while at the same time lowering costs and network strain.

286 perimeter breaches in ten years – this was the result of an Associated Press investigation on the busiest 31 airports in the United States. These incidents happened despite the fact that after the September 11 attacks, US airports had invested hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their perimeter fencing. They basically prove two things: First, it is anything but easy to protect large areas, and second, it is not enough to build seven-foot high fences with barbed wire on top to keep intruders out. What is true for airports also applies to any other critical infrastructure, be it a utility, a power plant, a refinery or a pipeline. And although public safety may not at risk here, the manufacturing industry has a strong interest to protect physical assets and intellectual property.

While a fence and security guards may be an appropriate solution for lower risk environments, critical infrastructures need more than that. Network video surveillance has the highest potential to drastically increase perimeter security. The most obvious advantage being image quality. In today’s video surveillance applications there is an ever increasing demand for more detail. However, the industry does rely too heavily on higher resolution and consequently more detail. More details and thus pixels means more data, which in turn means more storage capacity and a higher network load. Although highly detailed images make it easy to distinguish individuals or minor details, we need to find ways to reduce storage requirements and network strain. But that is not all. The number of cameras being deployed in the market place is also rapidly increasing. Even if storage requirements and network strain are reduced significantly we still face an enormous amount of data. This leaves us with the manageability and accessibility of video data.

Manageability and accessibility of video data
At the end of the day, security personnel or operators want to be alerted instantly when suspicious events are detected. Built-in video analytics from Bosch analyze real-time images continuously to instantly detect suspicious events and alert when needed once predefined alarms are triggered. This helps operators and security personnel to spend more time on other tasks, and respond only to important events. In case an event did occur operators or security personnel want to browse stored video data to find irrefutable forensic evidence. If time and place are exactly known, this is quite easily done as the videos carry timestamps. But if you want to figure out and understand the escape route of a perpetrator on the basis of multiple cameras’ recordings, your ability to do so quickly will be limited by the sheer amount of data.

Considering this, it would be helpful if network video cameras understand what they see. In other words when they add “sense and structure” to video data in order to keep video data manageable and easy accessible. Built-in video analytics from Bosch does all this for you and much more. For mission critical applications like the perimeter protection of airports, critical infrastructures and government buildings as well as border patrol and traffic monitoring, we offer built-in Intelligent Video Analytics. Small and medium businesses, large retail stores, commercial buildings and warehouses can for example make use of our built-in Essential Video Analytics for advanced intrusion detection, enforcing health & safety regulations, and business analytics like crowd density information and people counting.

Intelligence at the edge
Bosch ensures the highest quality and reliability of video analytics by putting it at the edge. That’s why every single network camera with either Intelligent Video Analytics or Essential Video Analytics can operate independently without the need for a central analytics server – so no single point of failure. This is called distributed or decentralized intelligence. If one camera or encoder fails, the rest of the system remains at full performance. Expanding the system is therefore also easy. Network strain and storage requirements can be reduced by only streaming what is needed, since the analysis is done in the camera. With intelligence at the edge, our focus is to significantly enhance system robustness and flexibility while reducing costs.

Alerting only when needed
Network cameras with built-in video analytics can be configured to automatically identify alert conditions such as persons approaching or attempting to climb over fences, reliably differentiating between humans and the proverbial cat that flits through the image. Alert conditions can also include objects crossing one or more predefined lines, following a defined line of movement or changing their speed (running), shape (crouching) or aspect ratio (falling). Camera-based, real-time processing can also be used to issue loitering alarms and perform left object detection, giving the security team the information it needs to react and take action quickly. Automatically tracking moving objects of interest can help to verify or disprove alarms, alerting the security operator as appropriate. Such tracking can be initiated by a simple click or automatically when predefined alarm rules are met. Once integrated with intrusion detection systems or access control at the gates, intelligent video can also be used to automatically verify alarms from these systems or to double-check the identity of an individual presenting her or his credentials at the gate.

Businesses are using faces to gain security and business insights

Smartphones and social media all utilize facial recognition, and user acceptance has paved the way for more varied uses. While the technology is still mostly associated with security, government and law enforcement, businesses are taking advantage of it as well for both security and business intelligence purposes.

The overall global facial recognition market is growing, expected to reach nearly US$7.8 billion by 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.9 percent, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets. The report cites the growing need for surveillance in public spaces as a major contributor to growth.

The unique capabilities of advanced facial recognition can be applied to almost any vertical. Also, since the technology requires no physical contact or credentials that can be lost, stolen or replicated, it is an attractive solution for many different applications. Add in the insights businesses can gain from its ability to easily identify and track individuals — which could provide them with valuable data to perform advanced trend analysis, productivity research workflow processing and so much more — it is no wonder more and more businesses are deploying facial recognition solutions.

Making Businesses More Efficient With Facial Recognition

Businesses are deploying facial recognition technology to increase operational efficiency and learn more about customers.

Nowadays everyone is using facial recognition and businesses are no exception. The use of facial analytics solutions to gather information on demographics and consumer buying patterns is expected to grow significantly in the coming years, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets. Adoption of face recognition technology is growing across industries, which is being fueled by growing awareness, advancements in the technology, and accessibility. For instance, the development of advanced facial recognition analytics that are centralized has made it relatively easy to apply to any networked camera, explained Shawn Mather, Director of Sales for the U.S. at Intelligent Security Systems (ISS).

With businesses also looking for more ways to utilize smart technologies, and with artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning gaining momentum, the use cases for facial recognition have opened up. Additionally, improvements in video surveillance cameras have allowed “organizations to realize the full value of video surveillance investments,” according to Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam.

“The growing sophistication of video content analytics (VCA) systems combined with the market’s fuller understanding of the ways in which video analytics solutions can drive organiza- tional efficiency and performance alongside security, has resulted in businesses of all types taking a deeper interest in VCA and face recognition,” Weagle said. From a retail perspective, leveraging facial recognition technology allows them to better understand customer demographics (e.g., gender, age, etc.). This data provides the retailer with a better understanding of who their customers are, which could enable them to better personalize the shopping experience and tailor their marketing strategy.

“When companies educate themselves on demographic composition, they create business intelligence opportu- nities to improve convenience in how people interact with their built environ- ments and to enhance the personal- ization of experiences in advertising,” explained Dan Grimm, VP of Computer Vision and GM of SAFR at RealNetworks. Grimm explained that companies can use facial detection and charac- terization, which does not retain any biometric information, to gain actionable insights of their customers. “For example, shopping mall owners will be able to make better advertising, leasing and customer service decisions if they know that between the hours of 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. they tend to see traffic of X number of persons broken down by 60 percent female, 40 percent male, with an average age of 42, based on a single IP camera properly tuned for an entrance,” he added.

Businesses are also using facial recognition to create customer loyalty programs to help identify VIPs.

Mather also highlighted the use of facial recognition in workforce management. This is a trend he sees on the rise globally. The ability to accurately identify and track personnel for time and attendance management with facial recognition is especially being sought after. Facial recognition is being deployed for this purpose in a large number of industries where large, but often temporary workforces are being deployed to either permanent or temporary sites, he said. “Perfect examples are factories and construction sites, where shifts change based on delivery schedules and production lines, and different groups of specialized workers need to be on production lines at different intervals,” Mather explained. These are just some of the ways businesses are using facial recognition technology for nonsecurity purposes today. In the near future, many expect facial recognition to become more mainstream where its use for even more business intelligence operations will continue to grow.

How Businesses Use Facial Recognition to Enhance Security

Facial recognition is helping businesses stop thefts and keep environments more secure.

More and more businesses are using facial recognition technology to improve situational awareness. Doing so gives businesses a smarter, easier way to monitor who is entering, staying and leaving their environment, while also increasing safety, security and convenience. Doug Aley, CEO of Ever AI, noted that “mission-critical” applications form about 75 percent of the facial recognition market. This includes use cases such as security surveillance, access control, digital authentication and government and law enforcement applications. According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the increased need for enhanced surveil- lance and monitoring at public places and the increased use of the technology in industries such as the government are driving the market growth. While the main purpose of deploying a facial recognition solution is security, it is also about “empowering individuals to use their faces as a token to gain fast safe access and authen- tication,” said Dan Grimm, VP of Computer Vision and GM of SAFR at RealNetworks.

Facial recognition is “ideal” for environments that need to positively identify individuals for physical and data security clearance, general access permis- sions, compliance with mandated regulations, and financial verification, according to Shawn Mather, Director of Sales for the U.S. at Intelligent Security Systems (ISS).

In a business environment, such as retail, “this could mean leveraging footage of different shoplifting incidents, assembling a suspect watchlist using frames from video surveillance, and then responding to alerts triggered by a video content analytics (VCA) system’s detection of a biometric match for the suspected shoplifter,” explained Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam. From there, security or police officers could investigate further to determine whether the alert has correctly identified the shoplifter and, if so, apprehend the perpetrator before the store bears further losses.

Facial recognition can also be used to provide live analytics for industries where there are high numbers of unknown visitors (e.g., malls, retail spaces, event venues, stadiums, etc.). This also applies to large enterprises with high visitor flows, such as hospitals, universities and stadiums, that have a need to know when persons of interest appear on camera. Grimm used a sports stadium as an example. Stadium operators might flag banned patrons in its database, while box owners may want notifica- tions when VIPs are onsite, in order to properly greet them and provide a superior level of customer service. “To support effective ‘watchlists’ — both for threats/concerns and for VIPs — facial recognition systems must be adept at high accuracy under the real-world conditions of identifying people in live video. This means avoiding false positive matches and reliably identifying people despite variations in lighting, orientation and facial occlusions due to scarves, glasses and hats,” Grimm explained. Customers from schools, office buildings and manufacturing are also using facial recognition to provide secure access to facilities. “In these cases, facial recognition systems enhance security in ways that are superior to badges, which can be easily stolen, and also offer features that catch piggybacking instances to offer a more accurate assessment of who is entering and exiting,” Grimm explained.

Facial recognition can also enhance convenience over existing access management solutions. For example, with facial recognition users no longer have to deal with situations where badges are forgotten at home or left on a desk. Grimm added that for secure access, facial recognition solutions should include anti-spoofing to prevent unauthorized access to those attempting to use a photo to gain entry.

How Businesses Should Protect Privacy When Using Facial Recognition

As facial recognition becomes more ubiquitous, concerns about privacy are at an all-time high.

Facial recognition has been entrenched in controversy lately. San Francisco recently made headlines by becoming the first city in the U.S. to ban the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement and government agencies; however, businesses are not included in this ban.

Built-in facial recognition in smartphones has helped ease the general population’s concerns over biometrics by making it a norm. However, many civil liberties groups and consumers are still just as concerned about how enterprises are using and storing facial recognition data. The determination of privacy is often dependent on the use case. In some instances, privacy is determined by the governing entity. For example, the Global Entry program, administered by the US Department of Homeland Security, uses facial recognition to verify that the person in front of the camera is the same as the one in the passport photo. “Not only is consent and privacy in this instance ‘implied,’ but also legally mandatory,” said Doug Aley, CEO of Ever AI.

On the other hand, consumer expectations of privacy and consent are often contingent on the application. “We typically find implied consent in situations where consumers are expecting it (e.g., consumers expect that bad actors are not allowed entry into the country, and so the concept of face recognition to identify them is acceptable),” Aley explained. However, there is a delicate balance that will come down to the difference between mission-critical applications (e.g., where the government doesn’t need permission to use an individual’s face) versus general purpose face recognition for casual, entertainment-focused applications, he added.

In terms of legislation, laws regarding privacy are rapidly evolving around the world. In the U.S., states such as Illinois, Texas and Washington have specific biometric privacy laws governing the use, collection and storage of biometric data. In Europe the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also has specific clauses mandating how biometric data can be collected, used and stored. For example, the GDPR states that EU residents must give explicit consent before their data can be collected, and that they have the right to withdraw consent at any given time — this is known as “the right to be forgotten.” Dan Grimm, VP of Computer Vision and GM of SAFR at RealNetworks, believes regulations are needed at a national level in the U.S., not just by jurisdiction. This would help to provide a baseline for how facial recognition can be deployed in ways that take into account the “important missions of our customers and the interest of the general public.”

While making sure all facial recognition deployments abide by privacy regula- tions is a given, whether in the cloud or on premises, businesses can further maintain privacy by doing their part. This should include ensuring that all data is encrypted in transit and at rest; systems are built with stringent cyber protections; providing the ability for individuals to be deleted from a system; and offering an opt-in/opt-out structure that encourages users to provide consent around the use of facial recognition. “For SAFR from RealNetworks, we find this particularly important and not only include these features out of the box, but also provide our customers with best practices for implementing facial recognition,” Grimm added.

From a consumer’s perspective, concerns surrounding facial recognition rests more in the hows (e.g., how it is being used, how it is being transmitted and how it is being stored) rather than the actual use of the technology, according to Shawn Mather, Director of Sales for the U.S. at Intelligent Security Systems (ISS). For this reason, he explained that privacy is much more an issue of application. In the future, we can expect that governments worldwide will continue to develop policies to regulate the use of biometric technologies, as well as define the rights of opting out of being tracked digitally. We may even see more cities opt to follow in the footsteps of San Francisco and ban certain applications of facial recognition technology altogether.

What’s Required for Businesses to Deploy Facial Recognition?

Getting the most out of facial recognition requires the right equipment; however, needs may vary by application.

The hardware needs of businesses wanting to deploy facial recognition can vary depending on the application. Not every situation requires the highest resolution camera or the highest computing power, nor does every every environment pose the same challenges (e.g., lighting, crowding, weather, etc.). Generally, in order to deploy a facial recognition system what is needed are a well-tuned camera, local computing power, and software. Hardware systems must be paired with the appropriate computing power to run facial recognition efficiently, which depends on whether you are managing a high- or low-density environment.

However, hardware requirements can vary greatly depending on the application and deployment architecture. For example, secure-access use cases, where you are viewing a few faces at a given time, can leverage lower-resolution cameras with lower frame rates and require less computing power (in addition to deploying fewer cameras), which effectively lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO), explained Dan Grimm, VP of Computer Vision and GM of SAFR and RealNetworks.

On the other hand, when using watchlists, deploying more cameras can improve accuracy and performance. Grimm added, “If the facial recognition platform supports a distributed architecture by doing detection at the edge and recognition in the cloud, then you’ve not only lowered TCO, you’ve also increased your ability to scale in a massive way.”

In the early days of face recognition, there was often a tradeoff between accuracy and device power. “Lower powered devices, either in terms of chipset, bandwidth requirements or camera resolution, suffered from lower accuracy,” noted Doug Aley, CEO of Ever AI. Today, Ever AI has had success in being able to deploy on everything from a single core legacy processor all the way up through a cluster of high-powered GPUs, like an NVIDIA T4. “There are now other companies like ours where the accuracy tradeoff is no longer an issue,” Aley added. Nowadays, speed is where the major variability comes in — the more powerful the hardware, the faster the speed of matching and the faster the overall user experience. Aley explained that most modern chipsets, especially from a quad-core onward, are going to be very fast. Furthermore, today’s face recognition models, and the frameworks off which these models are built, are getting more adept at handling lower-power chipsets. Shawn Mather, Director of Sales for the U.S. at Intelligent Security Systems (ISS) highlighted software integration issues over complications with hardware. Software providers, however, can overcome these challenges by making their solutions compatible with VMS solutions and electronic access control solutions. The type of facial recognition — 2D or 3D face recognition technology — a businesses chooses to deploy may also come with its own specific set of challenges and requirements. A report by MarketsandMarkets noted that captured images from earlier 2D facial recognition technology were highly dependent on illumination, meaning poor lighting significantly affected image quality. Another challenge was the “incompatibility of integration between software tools and biometric hardware devices.”

However, the report expects 3D technology to have the largest market share in the coming years. Unlike 2D technology, 3D technology is not dependent on illumination. This enables it to capture higher-quality images in uncontrolled environments, such as poorly lit or completely dark areas. Something else to consider in the years to come are facial recognition cameras, where the recognition process is done on-board at the frontend. These types of cameras, though, require strong computational power since all of the tools for recognition are on-board. While several camera companies are developing face recognition cameras, the overall market is still in a fledgling state, but may be something to look forward to in the future.

AI, Analytics Power Luxury Retail Customer Experience

The personal luxury goods market is growing, thanks to renewed interest from millennials. The retail channel of the global luxury goods market grew 4 percent in 2018, according to a report by Bain & Company. However, it still faces tough competition from wholesalers and online sales.
Izvor: a&s International
E-mail: redakcija@asadria.com

From a regional standpoint, China, Japan, Europe and the United States all saw positive market growth in 2018. Chinese consumers are leading the growth trend both domestically and abroad, with an estimated 33 percent of global luxury spend in 2018, according to Bain & Company.

Nowadays, everything is becoming digitally influenced in one way or another, and luxury sales are no exception. A report by McKinsey & Company stated that nearly 80 percent of luxury sales today were “digitally influenced,” meaning that “in their luxury shopping journeys, consumers hit one or more digital touch points.”

For luxury retailers, this means it is becoming critically important to better understand customers’ wants and needs in order to meet and exceed brand expectations. That is why luxury retail is finally starting to utilize artificial intelligence (AI), video analytics and other technologies and techniques more widely. By using such solutions, luxury retailers are now able to get a more in-depth look into what their customers want, not only improving the customer experience but also driving sales.

Luxury Brands Turn to Technology to Woo VIP Shoppers

Providing the best customer experience is one of the most important aspects of luxury retail, and retailers are turning to technology to ensure every customer feels like a VIP.

Tough competition for high-spending consumers means luxury retailers must provide VIP service at every step of the way. As Ray Hartjen, Marketing Director at RetailNext, puts it: “Shoppers don’t need to shop at any brand. Brands need to make shoppers want and feel like they need to shop a brand. Technology can help.”

Pressured by new entrants and online sales, luxury retailers are adopting fresh tools to better understand their customers. According to Andrew Fowkes, Head of Retail Center of Excellence at SAS UK and Ireland, this includes “looking at the end-to-end lifecycle of the products and services they sell — recognizing the importance and profit that can be made from ‘outlet’ business as well as full price offerings.” Hartjen pointed to the “connected journey” of high-end consumers, saying that following this from beginning to end could provide key information to retailers. “It will be important for luxury retailers to tie into and integrate seamlessly with shoppers’ connected journeys. They will need to understand how shoppers’ online experiences drive store visits, and how store visits have tangential and residual impacts later on in the brand’s digital touch points and channels. And, of course, they need to understand the key branded interactions that convert shoppers into buyers,” Hartjen explained.

“Luxury retailers are in many ways leading the retail industry’s response to shoppers’ connected journeys. Activations are regularly popping up around the globe where influencers and shoppers experience a brand and its ethos in ready-for-Instagram settings. The activations are more brand showroom than retail store, where the brand is the hero, not its products, and they allow for an almost continual sharing through shoppable social media platforms,” Hartjen said. “Luxury is investing in the shopping experience, because it’s what shoppers want and crave, and what’s good for shoppers is good for business.” Parallel to understanding the connected shopping journey is the need to understand who the shopper is. “Relevant communication and engagement is paramount to success, and in the luxury sphere, relevant means personalized,” Hartjen added. “The luxury segment needs to engage on a personal level, and to get shoppers to reveal personal information, there has to be value in it for the shopper. Those brands that do it well will have a loyal customer for life.”

While gathering consumer data can help retailers provide a personalized shopping experience, they must also comply with GDPR regulations. For instance, although video analytics and face recognition data is useful, GDPR rules require customer consent before such data can be used. But Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam, believes that should consumers opt in, luxury retailers can use data to optimize and personalize the shopping experience even further.

“Luxury retailers can create lists of VIP customers and upload images of these visitors to their video-content analytics engine. The video analytics solution can be configured to alert operators when key customers are recognized entering the store. By triggering a call to action any time a VIP customer walks into the store, sales associates can be mobilized to engage the visitor immediately and personally. When face recognition data is integrated with historic sales data, the retailer can quickly review and understand individual customer shopping trends and prefer- ences based on past purchases, and use this information to share personalized and relevant information and offers to drive sales,” Weagle said.

How Machine Learning, AI Improve the Luxury Retail Experience

Luxury retailers are utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand customer needs and improve the shopping experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are being introduced and utilized by nearly every industry. This includes the luxury retail sector, where advanced algorithms are allowing retailers to enhance the customer experience both in-store and online. Brands such as Dior have launched AI chatbots that can interact with and make recommendations to online shoppers. Burberry’s flagship store in London meanwhile, has fully embraced the digital age with a host of interactive multimedia tools, including smart mirrors that double as screens. In-store, luxury retailers are using AI and augmented reality (AR) to provide customers with a more personalized and immersive shopping experience. An example of this is smart mirrors, which can automatically recommend accessories for a given outfit, as well as allow shoppers to make a 360-degree video and change the color of clothes.

While luxury retailers still rely on human sales associates for the time being, AI and machine learning are playing an increasingly larger role in helping brands interact with their customers. As a report by McKinsey & Company states: “Big data and machine learning are bringing authen- ticity and relevance back into the customer relationship,” by providing advanced analytics to help brands offer services uniquely tailored to each customer and occasion. According to Andrew Fowkes, Head of Retail Centre of Excellence at SAS UK and Ireland, “applying machine learning to in-store data has great potential to help luxury retailers better understand their customers through their entire lifecycle.” He added retailers were also “utilizing these techniques to better understand demand patterns, to have the high-value merchandise in the right part of the world to fulfill demand.” Fowkes said luxury retailers were deploying machine learning techniques to better understand their customers and keep them engaged with a brand. Such techniques were also used to “apply more real-time context to offers or messages they put in front of their customers, or the messages their employees can use to sell more when face-to-face with the customers.”

Ray Hartjen, Marketing Director at RetailNext, emphasized the need for accurate footfall data, noting the importance of deep-learning based sensors such as RetailNext’s Aurora v2, which can accurately distinguish between customers and reflec- tions, shadows and shopping carts piled high with merchandise. Hartjen added that advanced sensors and processes were able to determine shoppers from sales associates, providing not only accurate footfall data, but also information on how, when and where shoppers and staff interact.

“Inside the store, sensors with AI determine what shoppers are doing at displays other than dwelling within a certain geo-fenced location. For example, the sensor can determine if a shopper reaches for an item, picks it up, looks at it more closely or tries it on, returns it to the display, etc. Deep-learning based human activity recognition delivers the data that allows for retailers to modify their store layouts, displays, fixtures, product assortment, staffing models — everything really — to drive the desired outcomes they’re designing toward,” he said.

Fowkes also pointed to the use of “computer vision;” a new discipline that trains machines to interpret and understand the visual world using digital images from cameras combined with deep learning models that mimic the processes used by the human brain.

“Our most developed customers can join online browsing data, social media influence and even images deploying computer vision techniques to automatically generate attributes. These attributes can then be used to fine tune customer real-time offers or future design and development of products,” Fowkes said.

Video Analytics: Providing Business Intelligence to Luxury Retailers

While the use of video analytics in luxury retail isn’t new, advanced algorithms are making it an increasingly invaluable business tool.

Video analytics are an optimal solution for luxury retailers. Not only does it enable them to leverage existing resources to gain operational intelligence, it also empowers them with the data to personalize and optimize the in-store experience. This helps to cement brand loyalty, increase engagement and ultimately drive sales. “Whether customers are window shopping, walking through the store, interacting with products or dwelling at certain displays, video analytic data helps the retailer understand visitor behavior and tailor the experience to meet consumer demands and expectations: from understanding when to mobilize sales associates to engage customers, to how to update the store layout for optimal navigation, video business intelligence empowers retailers to cater to luxury shoppers based on qualitative, actionable data insight,” said Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam.

While in-store video surveillance still has security monitoring functions in luxury retail, now more than ever it has become an important source of data. This is due to advances in analytics, which have retailers seeking new and innovative ways to collect and utilize data, while also taking advantage of existing resources such as video. “Many retail businesses rely on video surveillance for security monitoring; however, video analytics solutions are enabling retailers to harness video for more, such as optimizing operations and performance,” Weagle said.

In order to increase video-content-analytics coverage to optimize operations, some retailers are expanding their video surveillance systems. “By measuring traffic hotspots, store navigation patterns, dwell time and product display activity, the retailer can harness video intelligence to uncover trends; A/B test advertisements, layouts and displays and increase security and efficiency throughout its stores,” Weagle explained.

Furthermore, the demographic and activity data drawn from video analytics helps retailers make intelligent merchandising, staffing and inventory decisions to optimize sales at each store. Video analytics solutions are also enabling retailers to integrate data from sources such as point-of-sale (POS) devices in order to achieve more comprehensive analytics. “Retailers might, for example, draw conclusions about staff effectiveness by evaluating information about store entries and time spent in store, staff positioning throughout the store and final sales data,” Weagle said. “The ability to analyze and visualize traffic and shopping data into dashboards and heat maps makes it easy for retailers to identify inefficiencies, test solutions to problems and achieve data-driven optimization in store.”

This data can provide important insights into questions such as: Are shoppers dwelling next to a certain display, removing items but not purchasing? Are certain areas of the store underutilized or infrequently visited?

The ability to recognize and identify objects in video was also instrumental for employee oversight, Weagle added. “Rules can be configured to trigger calls to action for certain employee activities. For instance, by adding images of employees and using face recognition capabilities, the retailer can set alerts for when employees enter the stock room or to mobilize employees to the checkout when crowds start forming by the cashier.”

Slovenian Manufacturer Installs Advanced at State-of-the-Art Head Office

Advanced, a global leader in the design, manufacture and supply of intelligent fire systems, has been specified in the Head Office of a leading European manufacturer.

With more than 200 employees, Slovenia-based manufacturer, Pirnar, export their luxury, high-specification doors across the globe for installation in residential and commercial premises. The manufacturer is synonymous with quality in the window and door industry and its high-end entrance-ways have won awards for their significant design and technological innovations.

Situated in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, Pirnar’s 47,000 sq ft, state-of-the-art facility houses storage, service and training rooms in the basement, production and sales on the ground floor and offices on the upper floor. At the centre of the building’s active fire protection is an Advanced Axis EN fire system linked to 230 devices.

The industry-leading Axis EN system, which was recently certified by FM Approvals to the EN54 standard, communicates with the site’s BMS, third party CO detection system, Access Control system and third-party Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system for the purposes of smoke control, enabling the fire services to operate smoke vents, fans and dampers in cases of emergency.

Responsible for the design, installation and commissioning of the fire system was Advanced partner Bildos d.o.o., Mr. Damjan Birk, managing partner at Bildos Ltd, said: “With Pirnar’s reputation for quality and perfection we knew that only the best would be good enough. It’s for these reasons that Advanced was specified to protect their head office. The robust Axis EN system is easy to service and is backed up by award-winning technical support, making Advanced the right product for Pirnar’s Headquarters.”

“Advanced Electronics fire protection system has given us an increased feeling of safety and control, it adds confidence in how we’re running our business. We can keep growing and moving forward knowing our infrastructure protection is state of the art and constantly up to date”, Pirnar assistant director Ado Rupnik said.

“It was a pleasure to work with Bildos Ltd to supply them with a high performance, ease-to-use system that would effectively protect Pirnar’s site against fire, where production and commercial activity run side-by-side”, Advanced’s regional sales manager for southern Europe, Vladimir Zrnic, added.

Axis EN is EN54 parts 2,4 and 13 approved and its panels can be used in single loop, single panel format or easily configured into high speed, multi-loop panels in 200 node networks covering huge areas. Advanced’s legendary ease of installation and configuration and wide peripheral range make it customisable to almost any application.

Owned by FTSE 100 company Halma PLC, Advanced have a long history of protecting high-profile manufacturing sites around the World including Rolls Royce’s aerospace facility and global manufacturer of pressure relief products Elfab’s manufacturing facility.

Advanced is a world leader in the development and manufacture of intelligent fire systems. The legendary performance, quality and ease-of-use of its products sees Advanced specified in locations all over the world, from single panel installations to large multi-site networks. Advanced’s products include complete fire detection systems, multi-protocol fire panels, extinguishing control, fire paging and false alarm management systems. More details can be found on the website at www.advancedco.com

33rd ASEAN Summit ensures clear dialogue between world leaders with simultaneous interpretation from Bosch

As one of the most important events organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the 33rd ASEAN Summit and Related Summits brought world leaders together in Singapore to discuss economic and political issues in the region. Chaired by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the five-day summit at Suntec Convention Centre featured representatives from China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, Canada, Australia, the Philippines and the United States, among others. Dignitaries in attendance included Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

With important issues on the agenda, simultaneous interpretation between twelve languages for all 1,300 attendants was a key to success during the five-day event. Making it happen proved challenging for several reasons: First, the multi-purpose convention center provided no permanent interpreter booths or wiring for interpretation hardware. Second, close to 20 meetings between world leaders took place in separate meeting rooms, with each room and meeting requiring its own interpretation set-up. And third, the temporary interpreting solution needed to be ready within only three days leading up to the summit.

Congress Rental Singapore – a member of the Congress Rental Network and official conference partner of Bosch Building Technologies – designed and installed the temporary setup for the ASEAN Summit using a combination of wired DICENTIS, DICENTIS Wireless and DCN solutions from Bosch. Responding to the requirements for each of the four different meeting rooms, the experts deployed a total of 31 DICENTIS Discussion devices with touchscreen, 36 DICENTIS Wireless discussion devices with touchscreen and 33 DCN Conference devices with language selector. For the language interpreters provided by the government institution, 56 DCN Interpreter desks offered a familiar technology platform.

This set-up allowed Congress Rental technicians to equip each meeting between world leaders as the situation required. For instance, higher-level meetings held in the two plenary meeting rooms on level four of the venue could be supported either by DICENTIS Discussion devices or DICENTIS Wireless discussion devices, depending on the conference day and how much transition time was available to change the set-up for the next meeting. For the fastest build-up and break-down, the best choice proved to be DICENTIS Wireless devices paired with INTEGRUS Pocket receivers and headphones pre-set to the listener’s preferred language.

Several of the meetings during the five-day event ran at the same time, so Congress Rental decided to centralize its simultaneous interpretation capabilities. In a central location, 28 temporary booths were set up, each equipped with two DCN Interpreter desks. From there, interpreters delivered live interpretation to delegates in the plenary meeting rooms and summit attendees in the listening room on level 3. More than 1,300 INTEGRUS Pocket receivers were available in the listening room, where attendees could follow proceedings in any of the 12 languages used at the event. At the same time, automatic camera control tracked the interactions between world leaders in the plenary meeting rooms, which attendees could watch live on the installed TV screens on level 3.

Throughout the five-day ASEAN Summit, Congress Rental Singapore kept a number of technicians on-site to ensure system performance and hand-over of conference devices between participants several times per day. Via the user control software on the backend, the digital system from Bosch provided Congress Rental Singapore with valuable data on microphone usage and interpreter performance, plus a chance to address potential issues in real time, which was highly valued by the summit managers: “I have continually received nothing less than complete admiration and the highest appreciation for the way simultaneous interpretation services were managed, and for the performance and quality of the attending Congress Rental staff”, said Chris Jackson, ASEAN, Australia Special Taskforce.

Overall, the combination of hands-on support and flexible technology platform proved a success: The over 1,300 participants of the 33rd ASEAN Summit and Related Summits enjoyed a productive event accompanied by seamless interpretation in twelve languages. In addition, the solution was dismantled and ready to be redeployed at the next high-level conference only a few hours later.

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a&s Adria – professional security magazine for providing total security solutions is a monthly circulating publication and a licenced representative of Messe Frankfurt New Era Business Media for Adriatic region, which consists of following countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, FYR Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia.