Artificial Intelligence For Enhancing Business Security

If you are a business owner, you already know the importance of business security. Most of the businesses are just one ‘security mishap’ away from a temporary or a total failure. Security mishaps come in different sizes and shapes, such as the occurrence of fire or thefts happening inside your business premises.  All these mishaps make the business to suffer from monetary losses as well as the negative impact on the business’s reputation. Let’s see a couple of examples,

A huge fire at an Airbus subsidiary factory in 2018 has resulted in millions of euros worth of damage to the company. The mishap has negatively impacted the business’s ability to achieve the targets in aircraft delivery. The cause of the mishap was not identified and it took firefighters several hours to bring the fire under control. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports that 40% of businesses do not reopen after a disaster and another 25% fail within one year.

On a different note, corporate security experts estimate that 25 to 40% of all employees steal from their employers. Based on information gathered from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) 2014 Global Fraud Study, the median loss caused by a single case of occupational fraud is $145,000. The study also revealed that companies with less than 100 employees had 28% higher fraud losses than larger companies.

These security threats are presenting a huge challenge for the business’s growth. Security mishaps are the worst nightmare for any business and for the same reason, they spend big money to set up security surveillance infrastructures. For any business, it is an ongoing mission to improve safety and security.

Today’s security surveillance systems comprise of three parts in a high-level view,

⊗ First one is a CCTV camera which records the visuals of an institution’s premises.
⊗ Secondly, a monitoring device which displays the video footages from the monitored area
⊗ And finally,  security officer analyzing the video footages to identify potential hazards.

According to a new study by Microsoft Research, security surveillance systems are projected to grow 20% worldwide every year for the next five years. Currently, there is a camera installed for every 29 people on the planet, and in developed nations, the number rises to a camera for every eight people. Even though businesses worldwide use CCTV systems, it is not yet helpful to identify potential business threats.

CCTV systems are not enough!

Even though most of the businesses have installed CCTV cameras in their business premises, its not adding much value to the business. At present, a CCTV infrastructure is helping the business in 2 ways,

⊗ CCTV systems are helpful in post-accident investigations to identify the cause of the accident.
⊗ If a person keenly monitors all CCTV footages, he can detect the occurrences of security threats

DID YOU KNOW? the average human attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s. A recent study found that the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2018. In comparison, scientists believe that the goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.

This means that no person can closely observe the video footages from CCTV cameras for a long time. Analyzing the footages from CCTV cameras that output video footages 24*7 is not in the ability of humans who has the attention span of 8-12 seconds. In this scenario, CCTV cameras turn out to be just an infrastructure to investigate the mishap after its occurrence. But what if this system can be improved? What if technology can make this process more effective? The answer lies in Artificial Intelligence. Today, AI-powered real-time video analytics presents a solution for this headache faced by businesses worldwide.

What is real-time video analytics?

In real-time video analytics, video streams are monitored by software to detects events, objects, patterns, specific behaviors, etc. Such software can also perform forensic analysis of historical data to identify trends, incidents and intends in the captured visuals. These insights can be used to generate automatic alerts and notifications. In a nutshell, real-time video analytics facilitates businesses to analyze, organize and share any insight gained from the video data to make smarter and quick decisions.

AI-powered real-time video analytics for security surveillance

AI-powered real-time video analytics system such as EMOTYX can closely observe a business’s premises and identify security threats. The CCTV cameras hooked up with video analytics can provide companies with a wealth of information about how the business is being run, what customers and employees do etc. The main advantage of having the real-time streaming of video will help to understand and detect several causes that can affect an organization negatively. The analysis through video will easily catch up things that a human eye cannot. VIdeo analytics for security is already being used by many governments including Dubai Government who uses the technology for suspect detections and rules violation detections.

Security-based analytics can also excel at behavior analysis, whereby simply observing and analyzing somebody ’s walk and talk, make the system to identify their behavior being suspicious. other features such as motion and object detection with the use of video object tracking are already put to use in many places where the system can identify loitering, identification of the suspicious object, crowding, occupancy in places like airports, sports venues where there are lots of behavioral as well as suspiciousness can be notified. Anomaly detection is helpful to detect anomalies happening in a specific region. For example, detection of fire in factory premises or detection of movement in an entry restricted office space, etc. When a deviation happens from the usual activities that happen in a place, the system is able to alert the concerned official, take automated actions such as alerting firefighters in case of a fire detected in a building. AI-powered real-time video analytics can help in;

⊗ Identifying natural mishaps
⊗ Identifying security thefts
⊗ Identifying employee espionages
⊗ Identifying unauthorized access
⊗ Monitoring mechanical processes executions in factory premises
⊗ Identifying unusual activities that need to be alerted to officials
⊗ Automated experiments
⊗ Rules violation detection

Today, automated surveillance is becoming a necessity. The advancements in Artificial intelligence is giving CCTV cameras the ability to identify security threats and notify the security officer to take immediate actions. With AI-powered real-time video analytics in place, its one less problem for a business to be worried about.