i-PRO (formerly Panasonic Security) announced a new version of its Active Guard intelligent search application. Active Guard ensures that the metadata describing the unique attributes of humans and vehicles captured by i-PRO cameras are delivered to popular Video Management Systems (VMS) from Milestone, Genetec and others. This not only allows “deep forensic search from edge-based AI analytics but also enables real-time notifications for operators of essential events that require attention.”

Active Guard Version 2 includes new enhancements for data search and visualization. As part of i-PRO’s open platform approach, new integrations with third-party developers bring valuable new metadata directly into the VMS UI for the first time.

One of the enhancements in Active Guard version 2.0 is a strengthened integration with Vaxtor, developers of high-performance Optical Character Recognition. In addition to Vaxtor’s LPR/MMC application for identifying license plates and vehicle attributes, operators can now utilize search filters for Vaxtor’s OCR Container and OCR Genesis apps, to recognize all types of text, including shipping containers, ID cards, passports, shipping labels and more.

Another example of third-party integration is from Morpho, which develops AI fall-detection analytics that can now be passed via Active Guard to the VMS.

Additional highlights of Active Guard Version 2 include:

• Timeline search — Operators can now track persons, vehicles or objects of interest across multiple cameras in the timeline. This enables a comprehensive display of the object’s route across camera zones over time.
• Enhanced Features for Genetec/Milestone Plug-in — By adding alarm integration features to both the Genetec and Milestone VMS integration, i-PRO has enhanced the user experience by clearly indicating alarm events with images and attributes.
• Expanded Usage of Dashboard Features — Enhanced graphing tools enable features like counting people in multiple entrances and pathways. Users can generate separate graphs for each counting line or merge data from different cameras, such as combining counts from two entrances into one graph. This flexibility in aggregating and graphing data provides more accurate insights into the flow of people in spaces like terminals or building halls, where movement occurs in multiple directions.

While many systems rely on server-based analytics, i-PRO’s AI-enabled analytics are processed completely at the edge, in-camera. This makes the “most efficient use of processing power and bandwidth while minimizing the need for additional expensive server hardware. By analyzing raw data directly at the sensor instead of using encoded data, this approach delivers greater accuracy and generates detailed insights that enable more informed decision-making,” according to the company.

Active Guard represents an innovative video protection application that further processes and transfers the data generated by the cameras to a VMS — only the metadata is transferred (not the entire video stream). The comprehensive Active Guard dashboard UI appears within the VMS for a unified user experience when visualizing and searching for unique attributes.

Beyond security, Active Guard enables a new level of data-driven intelligence and decision-making for companies seeking to use cameras as powerful IoT sensors to monitor operations efficiency and compliance. i-PRO’s Active Guard application is free of charge, and version 2.0 will be available at the end of September 2024.