NisurgTrackSafe
What are we solving for?
In recent times there were a lot of cases when a left behind backpack in a crowded venue carried an explosive device, leading to significant loss of human lives. Although most often the left behind items land into the “Lost and Found” department. In the US alone over 400 million items are lost annually.
Why is this important ?
We have observed rapid use of location tags to track possessions. Tags are owned and tracked by an owner of a material object. There are occasions when a facilities’ management team would like to ensure that individuals do not lose their possessions. Also in some situations an unattended object could trigger a safety alarm. For instance, if an unclaimed object was found in a crowded location, like an Airport, Movie Theater, Bar then it raises a suspicion. During events, like worldwide conferences and events people lose a lot of their possessions and the “Lost and Found” department needs to go on overdrive.
We propose a solution that tracks the possessions of individuals and triggers an alert when the owner leaves the possession behind. The tracking can be implemented by applying Computer Vision based AI models to identify possessions (like a backpack) in real time, calculating the time period of separation and detecting that an individual left the facilities without the possession. All the individuals within the reach of a camera can be processed simultaneously and continuously. There are no requirements of a physical device (like a tag) to be managed separately for tracking.
Solution
NisurgTrackSafe, is an AI based computer vision solution that tracks possessions using video streams from a camera. As part of the deployment, a venue Manager identifies the Entry/Exit location. When an individual exits a venue and leaves behind a possession, NisurgTrackSafe triggers an alert to the venue manager. There are several AI models that can identify a human body and separate out the possession. An alert is triggered when the possession does not leave an exit along with the owner.
Contributions
Unique Value proposition
NisurgTrackSafe is a cloud driven low cost software only solution and does not require deployment of any additional hardware beyond the existing camera in a venue. It can be auto deployed to identify the entry/exit location or a venue manager can explicitly mark them down to increase accuracy. The sensitivity of alerting criterion can be controlled based on the size of the possession and the period of time it was left behind. It takes minutes to deploy and check the efficacy of the solution. The algorithm can self check its own possession tracking decision by comparing the Entry and Exit images of an individual and identifying whether a possession did not leave the venue while the individual was exiting.
Competitive Advantage
There are several companies which use Bluetooth or WiFi based location tracking. The products from Samsara and Skyhook use hardware trackers. Overall asset tracking is an established market.
There are currently no competitors which can provide community safety and ease the burden on lost-and-found use case. NisurgTrackSafe is a low cost solution with minimal friction for deployment and without any specialized hardware.
The AI technology required to process video streams was not available in the past decade. We anticipate competition from AI based startups however we have the advantage of starting early with concrete feedback from potential customers. We have spent significant time with computer vision based models and have implemented contour and edge detection software. We are now preparing to isolate the asset from the human body under various light conditions. All these exercises and tests give us an advantage of being early in this field to be successful eventually.