So they’re letting us outside (sort of). Now what?
Scalable ways to stay vigilant when returning to the outside world and embracing the post-COVID normal using AI and computer vision technology.
Unless you’re lucky enough to live on a huge plot of land where one cultivates organic vegetables while taking long scenic walks, you’ve probably been tracking lockdown updates obsessively for any signs of hope.
Some cities around the world are slowly opening back up, albeit severely cautious with Wave 2 eager to pounce on us. There is a consistent theme across all these openings: Social Distancing and Face Masks.
Restaurants, shops, trains, and airplanes can implement physical barriers to enforce some form of social distancing by lowering capacity or removing seats. However, humans are flawed, so there will undoubtedly be people who believe they are too good to abide by the rules.
So how do we detect when violations occur without needing a fully-staffed patrol team babysitting patrons?
And what if you live in a country where you can’t actually enforce nor encourage social distancing, because #freedom?
How can we leverage data to understand where and when new cases of outbreaks could occur so that we are well-prepared?
The secret sauce is leveraging a powerful tool that already exists in most places such as restaurants, shops, and even homes. Think of your corner shop with the camera pointing straight at the till, or the stores with cameras pointing at every angle to prevent shoplifters, or even the Nest (or <insert any camera purchased on Amazon>) installed throughout your home.
The city of London alone has over 600,000 CCTVs installed around the city. Yes, London is on the higher spectrum for public surveillance. However, the next time you’re flying somewhere, take in all that empty space around you and count all the cameras around. The lounges and shops aren’t open anyway due to COVID-19.
Cameras are already installed in key areas of population density. If not, the camera market is so commoditized that anyone can self-install cameras and plug it into the cloud.
We can have cameras to cover every corner of the Earth, but there are not enough people nor eyes to truly monitor every video feed.
This is where the beauty of AI and computer vision come in — specifically, the Shapes AI solution.
Shapes AI, an award winning computer vision and artificial intelligence company, has launched a platform to support tracking and monitoring of social distancing and the wearing of masks.
Recent reports and predictions point to social distancing and wearing of masks needing to be part of our ‘new normal’ for a while to come. But implementing and monitoring these new behaviors is not straightforward, as authorities and now businesses, have discovered over recent weeks. To facilitate this, Shapes AI has leveraged its proprietary computer vision technology to automatically assess the extent to which these preventive measures are being observed and to highlight any hotspots of potential danger.
Shapes AI actively analyzes video feeds to alert users of key events such as social distance violations or people not wearing face masks where mandatory.
<as of writing, airports across the US and UK have already adopted these face mask policies>
This means you will no longer need an impossible amount of people on security staff to monitor for issues. Remember, one violation can easily increase the “R” that we’ve been working so hard to bring down.
The company’s breakthrough technology reasons over video feeds to understand the human behaviours and events taking place. Through this, it is able to monitor the extent of both social distancing and use of face coverings or masks. It uses these elements, amongst others, to compute the efficacy of these measures in a particular zone. Shapes AI also extracts data driven insights of how these measures play out over time, providing a ‘Social Distancing Index’ that compares how ‘safe’ different premises, areas or cities are.
Data will be critical in helping us plan for where outbreaks will occur in the next 14 days, where to allocate more health workers, where to send more tests, where to dedicate more ventilators, where to prioritize more vaccines (one day), and finally — where and when it will eventually be safe to go back to our normal lives again.
“We have to accept social distancing and wearing of face coverings as a critical part of our everyday lives for a while to come, if we are to safely transition out of lockdown and back to some semblance of normality,” says Seena Rejal, CEO and Founder of Shapes AI. “In these unprecedented times, stakeholders at all levels need tools to be able to adapt to the ‘new normal’ and to do so quickly. We believe our solution can provide a key part of the infrastructure needed to allow communities and economies to open up again, and to do so as safely and sustainably as possible.”
Now, a common misconception is that video monitoring means violating privacy or that it is tracking your personal data. Let’s bust that myth.
Shapes AI’s technology analyzes the macro behaviors of people and crowds, meaning it does not incorporate any element of facial recognition.
The technology can be deployed as a turnkey solution, including cameras, as well as sitting atop existing video infrastructure and seamlessly integrating with video management systems and workflows.
The company has pledged to offer its platform at cost to institutions and organizations on the front line of the fight against COVID-19. If you are interested in more information, please visit https://www.shapes.ai/covid
About Shapes AI
Shapes AI is an award-winning and groundbreaking technology company based between London and Silicon Valley, with an elite team hailing from the University of Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. The company’s mission is to build a safer, better and more accountable world with the power of explainable visual reasoning technology. It’s computer vision AI empowers machines to ‘understand’, reason over and explain what they are seeing, going beyond simple object detection and image recognition. This offers rich video analytics and actionable insights into events, activities, and occurrences. It is light to train, quick to deploy, and ideal for complex real-world situations.
