نویسنده: اسپاد

Costar Technologies has announced t it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Arecont Vision out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The purchase price is expected to be approximately $12 million in cash, subject to certain post-closing adjustments as set forth in the definitive agreement. The acquisition, which is structured as an asset purchase, is subject to customary closing conditions. Costar is financing the transaction with proceeds from a new credit facility with UMB Bank. The Arecont Vision management team and employees are expected to join Costar following the closing of the acquisition.

After integration costs, the acquisition is expected to be neutral to earnings per share in 2018 and mildly accretive in 2019, due to operating synergies and improved efficiencies. Full earnings benefits are expected to be realised in 2020.

Arecont Vision is a manufacturer of network cameras and megapixel surveillance cameras, offering a large selection of megapixel IP devices. Arecont Vision is a US company with headquarters, R&D, manufacturing, and customer support located in California. It employsaround 90 people and generated approximately $40 million in revenue last year.

In making the announcement, Costar President and Chief Executive Officer James Pritchett stated, ‘The acquisition of Arecont Vision expands Costar Technologies’ video surveillance platform by strengthening our product line. It supports Costar’s strategy to become a leader in the video surveillance industry, transitioning from a value-added OEM product company to a manufacturing and design company. Along with our other recent acquisitions, the Arecont acquisition increases our manufacturing and design from approximately 50 to 75 per cent of our revenue.

Raul Calderon, the Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Arecont Vision, added, ‘Costar’s family of companies, composed of CohuHD Costar, Costar Video Systems, Innotech, and IVS Imaging, is a great strategic fit for Arecont Vision and provides synergies that can be leveraged to grow our business in new market verticals and product areas. Costar provides resources that will enable Arecont Vision to continue to innovate and lead the market. I am proud of our team, and we are grateful for the support, patience and continued commitment of our employees, suppliers and customers, as we look forward to being a new Costar business.

UAVs (unmanned aviation vehicle), more commonly known as drones, are increasingly being widely used for varying applications. Military UAVs now are vastly outnumbered by civilian UAVs, and the Dahua Drone has been designed for safety-based deployments.

There are two levels of drones: consumer and industrial. Consumer-level drones are mainly designed for aerial photography and personal entertainment. They are straightforward to operate and can capture editable images and videos. Industrial drones are built for public security and safety missions such as tower inspections, forest fire detection, public event management, security supervision over long ranges, detection for police forces, inspection of high speed traffic and other incidents. They include a different set of functions such as a high level of stability and safety, intelligent control, adaptability to different applications and environments, long distance mapping, a higher carrying capacity and long battery life.

The current drones from Dahua are claimed to transmit images at distances of up to 10km, with access to multiple VMS platforms, allowing real-time audio and video streaming to a control centre.

Benefitting from 30x optical zoom, the drones can capture HD images from a long distance, thus avoiding accidents when operated from afar. Equipped with a thermal camera, the devices can accurately locate abnormal hot spots in infrastructure, thus preventing incidents from occurring.

The thermal camera can also detect suspicious hot spots. At a height of 1500 metres, a drone can cover an area of 5 square kilometres in a single flight. If there is a fire, drones can fly regardless of high temperatures, transmitting relevant data to ground teams. Once the fire has been extinguished, the drone’s overhead inspection capabilities can prevent further fires.

Drones record real-time information about locations, traffic and personnel using a multifunctional camera, thermal imaging and automatic recognition of faces or vehicles. Using wireless transmission, the information can be sent to all mainstream VMS platforms. The drone has a 38 minute battery life.

On the Move Systems has announced that Robotic Assistance Devices (RAD), its wholly owned subsidiary, has deployed its first security guard robot at the headquarters of Romeo Power Technology in California. The facility will benefit from the addition of RAD robotic personnel which will augment the existing security, safety and operational processes in place at the site.

RAD is the perfect partner to help us increase safety, enhance productivity and control access to our facility, stated Michael Patterson, Romeo CEO and co-founder. In addition, our partnership allows us to gather data from the artificial intelligence market, which we know will play an ever growing role in our business.

Romeo is the exclusive battery pack technology partner to RAD. Romeo lithium-ion battery packs power RAD’s fleet of security guard robots, providing 12 hours of continuous operation regardless of terrain or climate. Additionally, these battery packs enable RAD robotics to experience four continuous years of use without replacement.

Romeo, founded by engineers and designers from SpaceX, Tesla, Samsung, Apple and Amazon, is an energy storage technology company in battery pack innovation, safety and reliability for vehicles and stationary storage.

The security guard robots, which are optimised with RAD’s customised services and solutions, deliver a cost-effective solution to augment traditional manned guard services. The robots serve as force multipliers and remove security personnel from potentially dangerous situations, reducing liability. The combination of human personnel with robotic technologies creates a strong value proposition that results in new levels of security and streamlined operations.

Surveon Technology has announced the GSe Pro 1004 series cloud NVR solution. The GSe Pro 1004 Series can fulfil both storage and surveillance needs, providing a solution to meet small-to-medium project’s cost requirements. Supporting up to 16 channels of 5 megapixel recording and 4-bay hot-swappable HDDs with RAID protection, GSe Pro 1004 Series is also ideal for projects demanding high reliability with easy maintenance.

The GSe Pro 1004 Series includes enterprise design, data protection and high reliability. Tt provides three cloud-based features: Cloud Cache, Cloud Backup and Cloud Tiering, which can automatically distinguish hot and cold data and can back-up cold data to the cloud, utilising storage efficiently.

With integrated block, file, object services and a cloud gateway engine in one system, GSe Pro 1004 Series supports data storage, multiple OS implementations and file sharing with built-in NAS for diverse applications.  Built-in RAID is included, with Intelligent Drive Integrity (IDR) to prevent data corruption, copying and cloning data. A web-based centralised management tool, EonOne, supports storage resource management.

From March 1 2018, the Bosch Security Systems division will be branded as Bosch Building Technologies. In the system integration market, Bosch Security Systems already offers customers more than security, safety and communication technology solutions, and Gert van Iperen, president of the Bosch Security Systems division, stated, We want the scope of our portfolio to be reflected better in our name as well.

The division comprises two organisationally discrete units: the global product business and the regional system integration services business which operates in eight countries.

The system integration unit provides integrated solutions for commercial buildings. Depending on the region, the portfolio includes building security, energy services and building automation. For customers this means planning, installation and operation of these solutions, as well as additional services, is possible from a single source.

The product-based business, to be known as Bosch Security and Safety Systems, will continue to operate as a global supplier of video, intrusion, fire-alarm and voice-alarm systems, as well as of access control systems and management software, all under the Bosch brand. Its portfolio will also include professional audio and conference systems for the transmission of voice, sound and music.

In its product business, Bosch Security Systems will merge its video systems, intrusion detection, access control and management software business units to form a single business unit, known as Security. The move is in response to the growing demand for sector-specific  integrated security solutions.

In combining these three business units, our aim is to ensure we can meet our customers’ needs even better in the future, stated van Iperen. In the years ahead, we want to actively shape the process of transformation brought about by the internet of things, as well as to focus more on connectivity, integrated solutions and services. At the same time, this move will strengthen our competitiveness.

Neil Killick, Country Manager, UK and Ireland, Milestone Systems – the world’s number one in video management – explains why a combination of human and machine intelligence will solve the challenges that face the world.

Worldwide we generate hours of digital video every second, and the huge volume of data a typical video system now creates is increasingly augmented by data from other sensors and sources. This data is fast becoming a tsunami that threatens to overwhelm video system users and make it impossible to get a clear situational overview.

Until now, operators have simply taken a look at video and made a judgement, perhaps aided by video analytics. This aid could be simple motion detection alerting an operator to activity in an area, or sophisticated heat mapping in a retail environment. It all centres around the operator, who is rapidly becoming a bottleneck in this workflow.

In every field of business there comes a time of disruption; for video security systems this time is now. Over recent years the industry has moved from analogue video tape and recorders to networked digital video and the reinvention of video as a data stream. Now we are entering the age of intelligent video systems.

Intelligent systems to the rescue

The only way to handle all the data created by video systems is to be cleverer, by deploying hardware acceleration and cognitive systems to spot issues faster, foresee incidents before they happen and predict trends. The ability to react faster limits the impact and cost of handling an incident. But what if it was possible to avoid incidents by predicting them before they occur?

To do this, video systems must be made more intelligent. Neural network technologies are now taking video content analysis far beyond the capabilities of legacy ‘rule-based’ analytics systems.

Rather than just evaluate a few pre-defined situations, cognitive video content analysis can learn directly from the video about objects and their relations, in effect establishing what is normal behaviour. This allows the system to identify objects and situations and alert an operator to unusual activities, predicting events before they occur.

Computer-assisted systems

The use of cognitive systems can help operators to make informed decisions faster and with more confidence. Cognitive systems are a category of technologies that use natural language processing and machine learning to allow people and machines to interact more naturally, extending and magnifying human expertise and cognitive abilities.

These systems will learn to provide expert assistance to operators in a fraction of the time it takes for an operator to make a qualified decision. However, the systems need tremendous computing power, which is achieved using hardware acceleration, where dedicated hardware handles the heavy lifting for the VMS. Another method is to integrate cloud services.

Either way, the openness of the VMS is the main issue, as the system has to be able to handle hardware acceleration or be able to interface effortlessly with cloud-based services. Robust cybersecurity is also vital. Whenever functions are added to any business-critical system, the system’s virtual armour has to be adjusted to ensure a safe computing environment. This is not something that can be simply ‘tacked on’: the system has to be designed with security in mind.

The driving force behind intelligent video

This step into the world of intelligent video is not one any VMS manufacturer can take alone. There is a need for highly specialised knowledge and services. This need can only be delivered by a community of hardware, service and solution partners sharing innovations with the wider community. This adds functionality, devices and infrastructure services for intelligent video solutions. Integration partners are then able to deliver the intelligent solutions that best meet user needs, and can also demonstrate a return on investment on business video systems.

Hear it first at MIPS

The VMS systems of today have delivered tremendous benefits by harnessing the integration possibilities of digital video to deliver enterprise and public productivity. The business video systems of tomorrow will change the way people interact with computing systems, and help them make complex decisions involving huge volumes of fast-moving data.

Milestone’s Community Event, MIPS, has become the benchmark for collaboration and innovation in the IP video surveillance industry. Now in its 13th year, 2018’s four-day event in Barcelona, from 6–9 February 2018, will focus on the creation of an intelligent world by harnessing the power of the open platform community.

To see how a combination of human and machine intelligence will solve the challenges that face our world today.