Hangzhou, China/ Aug 2, 2019 Before the new garbage sorting regulations take effect in Shanghai in July 1, residents of Shanghai had no experience in this matter and they are still confused by the complicated garbage classification standards. To solve this newly came pain point of those who live in or visit Shanghai, it is said that companies are developing intelligent trash cans that are smart enough to identify garbage types through information gathered from camera and sensors. That is just a glimpse of the life empowered by IoT, which can benefit us to an extensive degree. The city, the traffic, the home, none will be as safe as we know it if, for instance, a wanted man shows his face but not identified and no alarm triggered and no heads-up sent to the police in time.
While a buzzword in the tech world for many years and an even hotter topic today that permeates laymen’s conversations, IoT is now literally a big deal. The global market was valued at $190.0 Bn in the year 2018 and is anticipated to reach $1111.3 Bn by 2026, according to a recent report by Fortune Business Insights, titled Global market analysis, insights and forecast, 2019-2026. The analysts in the report predict that the global market will expand at a ferocious CAGR of 24.7% throughout the forecast years.
AIoT Rises
The rise of IoT requires multiple advanced technologies, including 5G, cloud computing, big data and AI, with AI being maybe the most important one. Thus IoT is now often directly referred to as AIoT, perhaps a more precise term indeed, since it is not just about connecting things/machines, but connecting things/machines that are smart enough to operate on their own, , in a swift and spontaneous manner when put to work in a complicated system, such as a security system.
AIoT smart security solutions not only saves man power but also in various ways outdoes man’s work. Security cameras, for example, are sharper eyes than security guards when connected with database. Each day a huge amount of visual information is collected by high definition cameras and transformed, through advanced AI algorithm, back into structured data, which can be computed and compared. In this way, AIoT makes it possible for cameras to not only record what a person does but also recognize who that person is immediately.
In addition to convenience and efficiency of crosschecking afterwards, AIoT security system can also deal with emergency when or even before it occurs. In short, it expands protection into prevention through pattern analysis. Since cameras are connected to other devices in AIoT, such as alarm ring and access control, the security system is in fact endowed with the power to take actions according to the information gathered and analyzed. Nowadays, cameras often work with various types of sensors that can provide instant information other than images and videos, such as temperature and wetness, which are crucial to the safety of places like museums, drug stores and farm houses. And as you can tell, the AIoT solutions in those cases will also simultaneously take care of these situations by automatically adjust the concerning equipment, like air conditioner and humidifier.
AIoT & Smat Solutions in Security Industry
In more complex situations in which there are more variables, AIoT, though still far from replacing the majority of human labor, offers great help in terms of saving the time & cost, and rearranging resources to the most efficient degree, resulting in various smart solutions like Smart City, Smart Traffic, Smart Retail, Smart Home, etc.
The city today is usually a very complicated organism consisted of many elements and departments, which, if not connected in the most efficient way, could handle neither the unexpected event nor daily operation. Since the police force as well as other manpower is limited, it’s critical to use them smartly, which is why Smart City solutions supported by AIoT becomes inevitable.
The concept of smart city was first proposed by IBM in 2008. Since then, countries start to develop smart city projects worldwide. But city is a complex and huge system in which it is impossible to realize sustainable development overnight. Different cities have their own unique features and spatial layouts due to the differences of economic development level、political system and culture，which make the pattern of success cannot be replicated. For example, Sao Paulo is the biggest industrial city of Brazil, and Hangzhou is an e-business center in China, we cannot just apply the same solution to these two cities.
With its rich experience from hundreds of smart city projects, in 2018, Dahua Technology put forward a concept called “Dahua Heart of City (Dahua HOC)” based on 1+2+Narchitecture. “1” refers to a big data platform. All data in the city level will be integrated into this big data platform for smart analytics. “2” means two centers - operation & management center and security center. Based on this architecture, Dahua Technology can serve “N” applications for smart city development. For example, safe city, smart traffic, smart banking，smart industry park and so on.
The same real time information collecting and sharing also applies to Smart Transportation Solution. For example, many cities around the world suffer from insufficient parking spaces. In China, there were 80 million parking spaces but 50% of which were still unused or vacant according to a report co-released by China Business News Business Data Center (CBNData) & ETCP Intelligent Parking Industry Research Institute. If, through AIot Smart Traffic Solution, real time information collected and big data from various departments shared and analyzed and resource rearranged accordingly, it is estimated that the vacancy rate could be reduced to 10%, which would be of great help to urban traffic controlling. Aside from parking lot, many other complex traffic scenesare in great need of AIoT solutions, such as bus, road traffic, airport, harbour, subways, etc. Dahua Technology smart solutions have been applied to Yarmouth Harbour in UK, Recife’s Subway in Brazil, Ulaanbaatar city road in Mongolia, etc.
The AIoT smart solutions can certainly be adopted by private sectors as well, such as Smart Retail Solution, which, for example, can automatically calculate the customer flow by security cameras that can tell people from object & backgrounds and thus optimizing employee scheduling. With more information, the store can make smarter business decisions.
And there is Smart Home Solutions. While safety may still remain the top priority for family users, it will not be the only value. Smart Home Solution make cameras do more than surveillance when they are connected with other house pieces through AIoT, such as the lock and telephone. Users can remotely authorize other people to enter simply through cellphone. And the video recorded will not just be about safety but also for entertaining purposes, such as checking out the live performance of your pets.
AIoT v.s. Cyber Security
The arrival of AIoT era has brought unprecedented attention to network security and privacy protection.
On May 25, 2018, European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially implemented to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union, imposing stricter requirements on the data processing by controllers and processors. Companies across the world, including security vendors, took various active measures, such as conducting assessing data protection impact assessments, strengthening data protection training, upgrading data protection technologies, and standardizing organizational compliance requirements.
As a result, business of third-party certification companies is booming globally. In order to minimize the negative influence of GDPR to their business, companies like Dahua Technology, Hisense and Deutsche Telekom have been actively working with companies like TÜV Rheinland, making sure that their related products and services are in compliance with IoT data security and privacy protection requirements as derived from GDPR.
More Players – Challenges or Opportunities
One analogy to AIoT might be water: it is practically everywhere, it is about everything and it is essential to the life as we know it, or as we ask it to be. There is no surprise that security industry, which is about guarding the very life itself, will be one of the pioneers to explore AIoT technologies and as a result one of the first to be benefited from it. Boosted by AIoT, the security industry sees ambitious new players coming into the game from telecom, IT, AI or chip manufacturing industries, like HUAWEI, Alibaba, Sensetime, Megvii, etc. The battle for the trillion dollar market in the very near future as aforementioned will in fact be a total war with many front lines.
For the more traditional players who have gone through two major transformations of security industry, first from hardware manufacturer to solution provider and then to the operator of platform, the new era once again, brings more challenges as well as more opportunities.
The main challenge is to integrate data. Due to the lack of top level design and immaturity of technologies, data is isolated from each other in different stages like collecting, storage, processing and application, resulting in information silo and fragmentation of data.
The opportunities for traditional players are based on the competitive advantage in audio/video technology and core intelligent algorithms. The huge amount of videos produced every day is important data sources if it can be calculated through AI, in which realm traditional players like Dahua Technology，with many years of accumulated experience and technology development, could ensure the continuous improvement of product quality and provide corresponding solutions tailored in customer requirements.
The AIoT evolution for security industry has come but still has a long way to go. In the current stage AI is more about advanced perception, but it is expected to be an advanced brain that can deal with highly complicated situations. That said, it’s consensus of major players that AI would be the golden mine in the industry. As each and every golden rush in the history of mankind, the biggest winners of the AIoT era, are likely to be the most experienced and the bravest ones.
