Asking Norman Ayob: Tackling Business Security with Canon’s Network Visual Solutions
Ensuring the sustainability of your business requires security on multiple levels, from data security to surveillance of your premises. Using its expertise in optics and networking technology, Canon has developed a series of powerful Network Visual Solutions; Mr. Norman Bin Ayob, Head of Sales & Marketing, Canon’s Innovative Solution Centre, tells us more.
Thank you for sharing some time with us! What are Canon’s key offerings for Network Visual Solutions?
We just launched our Canon Profile Analyzer last month, which seamlessly adds the capability of determining the age and gender of subjects to existing Canon Network Cameras. The People Counter, Canon’s first Video Content Analysis (VCA) solution, has also been introduced to the market this year as well. With these products being so new in the market, we aim to bring about awareness of this tech knowledge through showcasing them at events.
What does the Profile Analyzer do?
Canon Profile Analyzer allows companies to gather real-time demographic details and empowers companies to keep up with the constantly changing market environment. It can be easily integrated with the user’s existing Customer Relationship Management system to perform analysis based on the operation hours or scheduled intervals. With a wider range of data aggregation intervals of 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, this will allow maximum efficiency on the desired pattern of tracking. With the results collected, users can make adjustments to optimise resource allocations, enhance sales and marketing strategies to meet the needs of their visitors profile or improving productivity in various business functions.
What about the People Counter?
This solution counts the number of people in both recorded and live footage. It sounds simple, but it can go up to counting 1,500 people in videos and 7,000 in images, and has been crucially useful for surveillance analysis. If you’ve noticed while entering the event today, there were men at the doors manually counting the number of people with their tickers. Imagine all that hassle now removed with the help of the People Counter. It frees up manpower that could in turn do more meaningful work by interpreting the analysis provided by our solution.
What gives Canon the edge over other products and solutions?
I’m sure you know; Canon’s core technological edge is in imaging, and this stretches to our surveillance products; we now have the analytics to go along with quality images our products capture. The essence of analytics is accuracy; we have always delivered, and we will continue improving.
In what ways is Canon looking to continuously improve?
Our first foray into video analytics began over a decade ago with something as simple as facial recognition. Canon’s CEO Mr. Mitarai always emphasised on having to improve ourselves, so we combined our facial recognition features with products in the security and surveillance sector. Canon has since acquired Axis and Milestone, both experts at video surveillance technology and handling the back-end of recording systems. The result – we are succeeding at crisp and accurate video analytics solutions, with higher quality images that now require lesser bandwidth and space; a long way from just facial recognition in a camera.
How else do you see video analytics being useful, perhaps around our neighbourhoods?
We still see movie ushers manually checking for IDs in theatres. Video analytics work perfectly with verification processes like that, and that frees up manpower for perhaps more meaningful roles in the organisation, like reporting the analysis provided by the People Counter.
Visit the People Counter’s product page here for additional information and visual demonstrations.