Detecting unauthorized personnel is a crucial task for any business that needs to protect the safety of their employees and clients, or that stores valuable assets or data on-premises. Human security guards certainly have their uses, but they aren’t without faults, either: they aren’t available around the clock, they can only be present in a single location, and they’re vulnerable to human error (just like the rest of us).
Computer vision can help improve safety and security in the home and workplace by detecting unauthorized individuals. What’s more, computer vision models can run 24/7, with accuracy rates that rival or even surpass your human security personnel.
Depending on the situation and use case, you may be able to deploy computer vision in multiple ways to protect the security of your premises, people, and assets:
- Motion detection: In some cases, you may need to monitor remote or off-limits areas where no one should be present. A simple computer vision model for motion detection can help detect the presence of unauthorized individuals and send alerts to the appropriate authorities.
- Vehicle identification: If unauthorized personnel are using vehicles to enter restricted areas, you can use computer vision to automatically record the vehicle’s license plate and identify its brand, model, and color.
- Facial authentication: If only certain individuals should have access to a restricted area, you can use facial authentication to separate authorized from unauthorized personnel. Computer vision models for facial authentication have very high accuracy, run in a fraction of a second, and preserve user privacy by storing only mathematical hashes, rather than the images themselves.
Of course, this is all assuming that you have a robust system of security cameras and surveillance equipment that you can use as input to the computer vision model. The good news is that you can now run computer vision models on edge devices that are physically located close to the data source itself, rather than having to upload images and video to the cloud. This enables you to get real-time results, keeping your business premises, people, and assets as secure as possible.