Alarm.com brings AI to the SMB and residential security markets
The rise of advanced video analytics that has coincided with advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) software has been one of biggest trends in security over the past several years. While many of these analytic capabilities have been tailored to meet the requirements of end users in high-security applications or enterprise-class organizations, very few have been developed with the security needs of small and mid-sized businesses or even residential customers in mind. That may soon change, however, as Alarm.com announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new AI architecture and video analytics service.
Though they have had traditional analytic features, such as video motion detection, for some time, Dan Kerzner, Chief Product Officer for Alarm.com, said they really wanted to ramp up their capabilities in this area and that their acquisition last year of ObjectVideo, one of the industry’s pioneers in the analytics space, helped them to accomplish this.
“We used their expertise to help energize our investments in analytics and artificial intelligence,” Kerzner explains “Over the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve been looking into ways that we could bring a solution together that would have both the latest, cutting-edge technology in the area of artificial intelligence to make cameras maximally useful for small businesses and consumers, and at the same time, do it in a way that is tightly integrated with the Alarm.com platform, really easy to install and something that leverages cameras in the field today.”
Rather than just being alerted to motion within a region of interest in a camera’s field of view, Alarm.com’s new analytics engine provides users with object classification and object tracking technology to help distinguish between people, vehicles and animals, as well as determine an object’s direction of movement and duration of activity. Users can also selectively control and manage notifications and assign virtual zones and multi-directional tripwires to monitor their property for specific activity. Among some of the activities users can monitor for include:
- Vehicles traffic: Monitors when a vehicle stops outside of a home during the daytime, or if a vehicle leaves unexpectedly overnight.
- Lingering visitors: Users can receive video alerts if someone lingers by their front door, but not when the mail is delivered.
- Automated deterrence: Set lights and other home automation scenes to turn on when a person enters the backyard, but not when an animal enters.
- Vendor validation: Business managers can confirm that a delivery truck pulled into the loading dock, but won’t be notified each time a customer exits the building.
“You could setup a trigger line and get a notification if a car came into your driveway or maybe you don’t want to know about a car but you want to know if a person walked in front of your house. You can have a lot of precision about both what you’re seeing and where you’re seeing and have that go back to the home or business owner in a way that’s going to be useful to them,” Kerzner adds.
Kerzner says the ability to do object classification in conjunction with trigger lines, rules and areas of interest, combined with the tight integration of these analytics with the Alarm.com platform really makes video analytics more attainable for the masses. “Those different bits and pieces have been out in the market, but I don’t think anyone else has brought them together in a solution that makes sense for the mass market residential and SMB space with the level of capabilities that we’re offering and at the price points we have it at,” he says.
In addition, because the new analytics engine can leverage video from the company’s two primary cameras in the field today – the ADC-V522IR indoor camera and ADC-V722W outdoor camera – Kerzner says they can be easily upgraded to support the analytics offering without the user having to purchase any additional hardware. Though Kerzner says that they will obviously continue to evolve their hardware offerings and product roadmap, the company’s dealers don’t have to worry about waiting for new cameras to upgrade customers that want these capabilities now.
“The cameras that are on the truck today work great,” he says. “That’s also something we invested a lot of energy into because making a solution like this work for cameras that have been on the market for a while is not that easy to do. It’s always easier to wait for the next generation of hardware but we felt like it was important to give people the flexibility to go with the current generation as well.”
Kerzner says that dealers can get the training and education they need on the new analytics service through the Alarm.com Technical Academy and he encourages anyone with questions to contact the company’s sales or training team, all of whom have been brought up to speed on the ins and outs of the service.
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].