Loihde created an interface for a smart camera system

Is it possible to monitor school security more efficiently using existing smart camera systems? Smart Urban Security and Event Resilience Project (SURE) and Loihde carried out an agile experiment in Tampere, Finland, allowing data to move between different platforms.

Loihde is an expert in digital development and security solutions, and the SURE agile experiment allowed Loihde to use both business areas. To Loihde, there is only one security, covering physical and digital protection.

– Loihde is watching closely all public experiments and competitions, and has joined the Tampere Region Safety and Security Cluster. The opportunity to participate in the SURE agile experiments was found through the Cluster, says Mika Rissanen, Business Development Director at Loihde.

Creating an interface for data movement, an interesting task

Video surveillance is an important factor in security: human eyes are not able to be present everywhere nor every time. Surveillance cameras come in many categories, but the trend is towards smarter cameras capable of generating analytics events. For example, they can detect people or cars moving in certain areas, count people going through certain doors or monitor safety distances. 

– Our task was to retrieve analytics events from the Avigilon camera system and send them to the SURE project partner’s Insta Blue Aware platform for further processing. In other words, we created a technical interface between the camera and the cloud service, says Rissanen.

The SURE project is aiming to integrate data, gathered from various sensors, into situational awareness. SURE focuses on safety and security in the centre of Tampere and its venues, but the project is also interested in keeping educational facilities safe.

Outcome: total success

Loihde installed smart cameras at an educational facility in Tampere, then created the interface and verified that everything works and data flows.

– The experiment went just as expected and is now scalable for all those systems with modern Avigilon cameras. Loihde has a ready-made package for this, and also the SURE experiment as a reference, says Rissanen.

The experiment produced ideas that could be developed further. One of them is about how to recover images that have triggered alarms. Usually security systems generate real-time data, and certain situations would be worth a reinspection.

Discussing facial recognition

Video surveillance – especially views on facial recognition – are world-wide hot topics. The EU is considering regulating and limiting the use of biometric identification systems in public spaces. To what degree can facial recognition be used in law enforcement, remains to be seen.

– At the same time AI and analytics are advancing rapidly. Not very long ago I heard about a solution, in which the algorithm was able to detect pickpocketing from a video feed, Rissanen says.

The SURE project prepared for their agile experiments for example by having a thesis done. Based on it, facial recognition was clearly ruled out from the SURE experiments and solutions.

– AI does make possible a wide variety of use cases where biometric recognition is not necessary. For example, it can be used for people counting systems, facility utilisation rate calculations or detection of dangerous situations, says Petri Nykänen, Director at Business Tampere. 

The experiment was a part of the SURE project (Smart Urban Security and Event Resilience). The project was granted 3,2 million euros from the Urban Innovative Actions, an ERDF-funded initiative of the European Commission.

Business Tampere is responsible for the upscaling of solutions, and provides a framework in which the technology providers can run the experiments.

Tampere Region has a significant concentration of safety and security know-how and organizations, both nationally and internationally. There is more than 250 organisations related to safety and security in the region. Tampere region safety and security cluster, which has been in operation since 2011, provides an easy access to local ecosystem.