One technology that has gained traction across the security industry in recent years is Lidar, which uses a stream of lasers to create a 3D image of the surrounding area. It is one of the technologies that makes autonomous vehicles possible and has also been touted as a potential game-changer for perimeter security applications.
In conjunction with the rise of Lidar, video surveillance has also seen its fair share of innovation in recent years, predominantly around intelligent video analytics with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions powered by a new and improved wave of machine learning algorithms. Unlike the video analytics that were highly touted and then quickly fizzled a decade ago, many believe AI has real staying power and will eventually revolutionize the industry.
What if you could combine these two technologies to create a solution that provides the best of both worlds? That is exactly what Oyla intends to do with its new 3D-aware surveillance camera that integrates Lidar with video and thus creates an image that can greatly improve the accuracy of video analytics.
According to Oyla CEO Srinath Kalluri, who has an extensive background in photonics having previously served as senior director and head of R&D at Intel’s Silicon Photonic Products Division, they saw an opportunity to bring over technology from this space to the realm of video surveillance to make better cameras.
“One of the things we noticed in this space was that it was hungry for our solution,” Kalluri says. “Based on the trajectory of the technologies in this space, we saw the convergence of AI and our technology – our background in communications theory, lasers, optics, and cameras – and knew we could come up with a solution that would really enhance the intelligence that you can get at the point video surveillance needs to happen, right at the point of the event itself.”