Dubai
There will now be no escaping the hawk-eye of video surveillance in public places, thanks to new technology that incorporates deep learning features, a global artificial intelligence (AI) tour in Dubai has highlighted.
Speaking to XPRESS on the sidelines of the tour last week, Binson Xu, regional president of China’s tech major HIKVision, said, “AI is changing the world in a way no one could dream of. CCTV has long been known for its uses during and after an event, but AI’s ability to make predictions makes it valuable even before the event.”
Highly precise
He said the highly precise facial recognition technology had led to the arrest of five wanted criminals in five concerts by popular singer-actor John Cheung back home in the past couple of months.
“The authorities were able to zero in on the suspects because of the surveillance cameras installed at pre-concert security checks,” he said. Xu explained how new facial detection software can analyse images and determine the presence of a human face on their own. The surveillance technology, which carries out a face comparison from a vast facial-recognition database, can identify a person within seconds. The deep learning technology has an automatic alarm accuracy of over 90 per cent as it filters out insignificant objects and movements from a scene.
- BINSON XU, HIKVISION
Xu said the AI technology can not only locate suspects at large, but also trace people who are lost, prevent potential thefts and crimes. It can also analyse vehicle behaviour and detect traffic violations.
“Vehicle structured data gathered is very precise and of very high resolution, just as the human face search enables the system to find matches from recorded footage.”
He said artificial intelligence is also reshaping the retail experience. “This is true whether it is to analyse some confusion over a customer’s payment or for people counting to help retailers deploy resources in keeping with the footfall and time of visits. Supermarkets also use AI for hot mapping to find out which areas in their spaces tend to be crowded so they arrange their products accordingly. Similarly, with cameras recognising faces, VIP customers are identified and attended to.”
The tour, which held two separate workshops at the Five Hotel on Palm Jumeirah, focused on several AI projects in hospitality, financial and real estate projects, besides safe cities and intelligent transport systems. Top police officials and water and electricity authorities from across the UAE were present.
