Two common options for surveillance and perimeter protection are visible cameras with near infrared illumination capabilities and thermal imaging cameras—both are optimal for distinct situations. However, optimal lighting isn’t always available or guaranteed, especially when a scenario calls for 24-hour awareness for security applications, including outdoor, remote, or rural locations, or if there is need to see beyond the fence line to identify and react to incoming threats.
The use of thermal imaging cameras (TICs) in assault cases is a relatively new concept for first responding officers and investigators, and can be a helpful tool at the enterprise level.
C2MI, the largest electronic systems research center in Canada, is implementing an AI-driven thermal screening technology to increase occupant safety at its facilities and allow security staff to focus on other critical tasks.
One of the largest Sea Bass and Bream fish farms in the Mediterranean for sustainable aquaculture, Avramar, wanted to improve the security arrangements of the farms, to ensure that both their assets and their employees were well protected.
To limit the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 virus, many businesses across the globe have deployed social distancing requirements, stringent cleaning protocols and capacity limitations as part of their plan to safely reopen. Even with these measures in place, retailers, office complexes and educational facilities are recognizing that technology will also play a critical role to help identify individuals who may have the virus even before that person enters the premises. This is where thermal imaging camera systems play a pivotal role.
With treatment plans still far from being perfected, clinical trials just getting underway, and a discovered vaccine a year or so out, preventive methods and detections — in addition to social distancing and donning facial masks — are needed now more than ever in the war against the COVID-19 and any future epidemic outbreaks.
When designing a surveillance system that is to be used in the outdoors, changing lighting conditions are one of the biggest challenges to overcome. So over the past several years, low-light surveillance technology has been growing in importance as a means to improve outdoor surveillance designs, and megapixel imagers have been modified to improve identification.
Copper theft has become a major crime in the United States, thanks to record prices for the metal and hard economic times. As a New York Timesarticle put it, the current conditions have “spurred a resurgence in the past several months in the theft of common items that in better economic times might be overlooked — among them, catalytic converters from automobiles and copper wiring that is being stripped out of overhead power lines, tornado warning sirens, coal mines and foreclosed homes, where thieves sometimes tear down walls to get to copper pipes and wiring.”
