AnyVision rebrands as Oosto and widens computer vision safety focus

AnyVision is now known as Oosto, giving the company a blank associative slate on which to build its brand with a focus shifting for its computer vision and facial recognition towards a wider range of recognition technologies for public safety.

Oosto has also partnered with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometric Research Center on early-stage research in recognizing objects, bodies and behaviors.

The new name was chosen because it is short, easy to pronounce, and free from pre-existing associations, the company says.

The company will offer solutions for touchless biometric access control, video analytics, and new types of vide-based recognition.

Oosto CMO Dean Nicolls explains that the change reflects a shift in focus to pursue the significant growth opportunities in protecting customers, guests and employees from a wide range of safety and security threats with object, body and behavior recognition.

“Historically, our company has focused on security-related use cases for our watchlist alerting and touchless access control solutions,” explains Oosto CEO Avi Golan. With the launch of Oosto, we’re looking beyond the lens of security to include ways our solutions can positively impact an organization’s safety, productivity and customer experience.”

The company’s products are also getting new names, with A Better Tomorrow becoming OnWatch, and Abraxas becoming OnAccess, joining the edge-based facial recognition tool OnPatrol.

CMU partnership

Oosto and CMU will work together on advanced object classification and behavior recognition algorithms for commercial use cases.

Professor Marios Savvides, who is also founder and director of the Biometrics Center, will join Oosto’s AI team led by CTO Dieter Joecker as its chief AI scientist.

“We were impressed by Oosto’s commitment to the fair and ethical use of the technology, preserving user privacy, and creating safer spaces for everyone,” says Savvides. “These shared values make Oosto an ideal research partner for CMU to advance object, body, and behavioral recognition and to positively impact our collective safety.”

Savvides was part of a recent panel discussion on biometrics for law enforcement, and holds more than 35 granted or published patents, along with over 50 unpublished ones. He was named among ‘2020 Outstanding Contributors to AI’ by the former U.S. Secretary of the Army, according to the announcement, and has focussed his research on facial recognition, iris biometrics, and more recently object detection and “scene understanding.”

Article Topics

Anyvision  |  behavioral biometrics  |  biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  biometrics research  |  Carnegie Mellon University  |  computer vision  |  CyLab  |  facial recognition  |  Oosto