How The Internet Of Things Is Keeping Us Safe
Public buildings and private business locations have been using IoT for years. For example, cameras have been used to feed video to monitors, or to record anything that passes within their field of vision. Today, smart cameras are used to monitor and recognize people and things that enter, exit or move through buildings. The days of the “dumb” camera—feeding a continuous stream of images to a guard who is charged with viewing six or more screens and somehow, quickly, recognizing a potential threat—are numbered. Smart cameras—IoT devices that are built with embedded technology, like Intel Movidius technology, can recognize faces and objects.
Each camera can monitor and broadly recognize people and things that are passing beneath it—if something that is outside of normal parameters is detected, a guard who used to monitor endless streams of video can now be signaled, the video with the “suspicious” images can be quickly shared and assessed, and the potential threat addressed. There’s intelligence inside the camera, and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), specialized chips that run extremely rapidly and can be reprogrammed to switch from one task (for example, rapidly digitizing incoming video) to another (enabling specialty observation of a suspected threat) significantly increase the value of the smart camera.
At the end of the day, or at predefined intervals, or when device memory is nearly full, the camera can transmit video clips of all “suspicious” events to the cloud or other processing center for additional review and long-term storage. By using IoT and intelligence inside the camera, it’s no longer necessary to send hours of video (or continuously streaming video) when only a few seconds or minutes each day are actually of interest.
Yet IoT and building security goes beyond the smart camera. Other IoT devices—microphones, Infrared sensors and smoke detectors, to name a few—add to the ability to detect potential issues.
Airport security is one of the most challenging security tasks. At a busy airport on any given day, tens of thousands of people may be entering and exiting from dozens (or, in some airports, thousands) of doors. In addition to guards near the doors and agents controlling the access of all people into the airport, smart cameras with computer vision are also in use.
Future systems will be able to recognize “safe” faces, or the faces of people who have already passed screening or have taken affirmative steps to be included in a “safe” facial recognition file. These safe faces may include pilots, flight crew and previously cleared airport employees, in addition to the travelers who have gone through the process of being deemed “safe to travel.” Smart cameras will be able to identify these people, providing them access into the terminals, and reducing the number of people screened by security agents.
Smart cameras and other access devices can also be placed at gates, and at access doors that lead into other, secure areas of the airport that employees and vendors pass through. This added level of security may prevent unauthorized employees from entering a cockpit and tampering with airplane components.
Identification—driver’s licenses, official identification cards, passports—will continue to be screened by security agents, but the manual screenings may be replaced by the scanning of identification materials using smart cameras connected to the internet. The cameras will have extremely high resolution and will be able to detect flaws or other issues on the documents that may suggest that they have been altered. Text and facial recognition may also make it possible to check a no-fly or criminal database while the document is being scanned. In some cases, faces may be matched to names, in order to verify that the person presenting the document is the same person named on the document.
Computer vision will also be used to monitor traffic.
