Video surveillance, a value-added service for Axitea: Michele Oriboni’s interview on Tech from the Net

Axitea was established in 2011 from the integration of the security institute Sicurglobal and Mega Italia, a Brescia-based security systems integration company. This initial operation was followed by other acquisitions of companies related to the world of security, which led Axitea to become one of the leading Italian players in the security world. Axitea currently covers the world of security across the board, from night patrolling to cybersecurity and consultancy services.

We talked about this with Michele Oriboni, the company’s Technical Pre Sales manager.

What Axitea is today

We are now a Global Security Provider capable, in addition to providing security services, of implementing projects in the worlds of cybersecurity, video surveillance, intrusion, smoke detection and access control. We integrate advanced technologies monitored by our SOCs, which manage events 24/7 in both the physical and cyber domains. We mainly target SMEs, but also public administration and micro-businesses.

For the past five years, service innovation and technology have brought a strong imprinting towards constant improvement in the management, collection and generation of metadata and useful information that can be used by companies. This approach, thanks also to the vision of our management, has meant that Axitea is now in a prominent position in terms of managing services related precisely to technological evolution, an area in which our competitors operate in a more traditional manner.

Artificial intelligence is finding application in multiple fields. What contribution can it make in video surveillance?

Artificial intelligence applied in the world of video surveillance uses AI-trained video analysis algorithms.
We are talking about a technological evolution that has rewritten and is rewriting the entire world of private security.

Prior to this development, video analysis was based on mathematical algorithms which, due to their complexity, required high-performance technology and consequently a high economic impact. In order to make them work properly, specialists were needed to implement them, which made their use accessible to few.

For the past couple of years, however, Axitea has been evaluating algorithms developed through the application of artificial intelligence. In this way, thousands of datasets can be transferred to ‘engines’ that learn to recognise certain patterns (deep learning). An approach that, in the world of video surveillance, translates into the ability to instantly recognise an object or living being entering the scene.

Such algorithms are more efficient now than in the past. Whereas in traditional analysis it was the definition of the scene that determined the quality of the result provided by the algorithm, today with artificial intelligence this requirement is no longer fundamental. This has made video analysis cheaper, but also more efficient. In addition, these new algorithms have cut down on false positives and achieve a higher level of security for those who run them. The benefit at the SOC management level is substantial, but it also transfers to our customers who are not continually contacted when a false positive is triggered.

What characterises Axitea’s video surveillance?

The service has a plus that Axitea has managed to bring into its Security Operation Centre: giving the operator immediate evidence of what triggered the alarm. The moment an alert is triggered, the operator receives the signal together with a snapshot highlighting what triggered it. The Axitea SOC operator can thus immediately assess whether it is a false positive or a real alarm. Only then is the intervention of our patrol promptly activated and, depending on the agreed operational procedure, the police and the customer’s urgent contact details are alerted.

High-performance servers and even ultra-high definition cameras are no longer needed to analyse the scene as was the case with traditional video analysis. And this is an important accelerator for the solution being proposed on the market.

We can therefore say that we have turned a ‘blind’ alarm, which was handled by the old technologies, into a talking alarm with AI Video Solution.

How does video processing work on existing video systems?

These new solutions do not need advanced cameras and those who already have a video system today do not need to change it. There is in fact the possibility of inserting a GPU-based appliance within the camera network that captures the video stream and applies video-analysis algorithms developed with artificial intelligence to it. This appliance is then interfaced to the customer’s intrusion control panel to receive the system’s arming and disarming logics, and the generation of any alarms is routed to our SOC.

Axitea oversees the creation of all the rules needed to generate the alarms using the video analysis algorithms and undertakes the activation of the AI Video Solution service, monitoring it for at least 15 days in order to assess its performance and the possible presence of false positives, correcting the rules so that everything works as well as possible.

In the event that recurring false positives are still detected, our reference partner – who developed the solution – receives a dataset of images with which it retrains and improves the algorithm. This is due to the excellent symbiosis that has been created between the technical world and our SOC, as operators promptly report false positives that arrive to our technical support so that a solution to the problems presented can be found quickly.

The solution provided by Axitea is cybersecurity compliant.

Effective AI-based video analysis is naturally integrated with physical security systems and SOCs. What, in your opinion, are the steps to be taken to ensure ‘truly all-round’ security?

We are only at the beginning of a commercialisation of algorithms developed with artificial intelligence that will allow us to offer not only security services, but also facility services, and services related to a world that is moving towards data analysis and collection.

Axitea has benefited from this technology, but above all our customers have benefited.

Cameras today are no longer a passive tool as they were until recently, when they were only used for forensic investigation after the fact. Instead, today a video surveillance system is capable of detecting intrusions, doubling the level of security, and if combined with a service managed through SOC, it further multiplies the security of a site because it offers 24-hour coverage through experienced operators such as those of Axitea.

Interview by Patrizia Godi of Tech From The Net.