Biometric surveillance vendors adopt the app store model

App stores for edge surveillance cameras are growing with biometrics and computer vision products benign and otherwise. This is significant because robust third-party software development for a company’s hardware is a good indicator of business potential.

Microsoft’s Windows OS remains the template of growth through others’ work, but Apple and Google also have succeeded by inviting other developers to, in their case, fill out their respective mobile-app stores with attractive and innovative code.

Hikvision’s own store, part of its Embedded Open Program, boasts 128 third-party applications, one of the stronger showings in biometrics-heavy edge surveillance cameras.

Apps include AI-FIRE, which is capable of deep neural network video analysis of large environments, indoors and outdoors, where flame and smoke detectors are less effective at spotting trouble. The software was developed by A.I. Tech.

Automatic Number Plate Recognition, by surveillance software writer Milestone, enables operators to search license plates and vehicle color in real time and recorded.

La Chouette, a French maker of autonomous surveillance cameras, also has put its software on Hikvision systems, in this case to spot “anti-social” and illegal activities in urban and rural areas.

Another third-party app comes from URFog, which will release blinding fog when suspicious activity is picked up by Hikvision cameras.

Competing with Hikvision is app store Azena, a small unit within German multinational manufacturer Bosch, which is a large maker of surveillance cameras. Azena reportedly hosts more than 100 surveillance applications for sale to anyone looking to increase camera-network capabilities. They include facial recognition, behavior detection and other video analytics.

DeepSolutions, for example, sells its Deep Crowd application for counting people in multiple “control zones.” Another, related piece of code available on Azena is the Crowd Gathering Safety Alarm by C-Link Technology.

A.I. Tech, which works with Hikvision, also has developed its AI Bio for the Azena site. The app records biometrics in an attempt to determine ethnicity, emotion, age and gender.

Dahua has its own app marketplace which seems to host 18 applications sorted by categories including tripwire, flow management, people counting and others.

One software vendor, Intuvision, makes an industrial-park tripwire application, intuVision Edge, for Dahua systems. The app can judge crowd density, spot objects left behind, detect intrusions and other signals.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  computer vision  |  Dahua Technology  |  HIKVISION  |  research and development  |  video surveillance