Photography
A Guide to Smart Cameras and What They Can Do
Smart cameras have taken the world by storm. They offer many benefits that traditional security cameras don’t, like facial recognition and voice activation, to name just two. If you’re wondering what smart cameras are or how they work, take a look at our guide below.
These are cameras that have gone to and graduated with honors from camera school – just kidding, obviously.
These intelligent systems are basically vision systems that, in addition to the basic camera functionalities of image capture, can extract application-specific information as they capture images and make decisions used in intelligent automated systems like intelligent transportation systems.
What Are They?
Another way to describe intelligent cameras would be self-contained standalone vision systems with built-in image sensors housed in an industrial video camera.
The vision system and the image sensor can be integrated into one, which births a smart image sensor with all the necessary information interfaces like ethernet.
What They Entail
If you have a smart camera at home, it tracks what happens around and/or in your home and uses Wi-Fi to transmit the video to your smartphone or wherever you have configured the live feed to be sent.
You can also connect it to a free app that you can download on your smartphone to review later. Here is what brings it all together:
Communication
Intelligent cameras do more than just capture images. They come with audio monitoring systems that allow you to listen to conversations or keep an ear out, if I may, for any suspicious noise.
The icing on the cake?
It’s two-way in that you too can send back audio to the camera. Are those damn racoons back ravaging through your trash? You can shoo them away like you were laid back in your patio with a martini watching them get naughty.
Face Tagging
One great feature of these systems is the ability to recognize faces.
Assuming you have a general idea of how facial recognition works, these systems will alert you when unknown faces are in the vicinity. How to go about this is of course uploading photos of everyone who’s welcome to your house into the system and from then onwards, anyone else is officially unwelcome – as far as the intelligent camera is concerned at least.
You can also tag family and friends’ faces in the footage as unsuspicious – unless you have some questionable characters in your circle.
To avoid being bombarded with notifications, customize alerts for your loved ones so you know if you need to start dialing 911 or not when a notification comes in.
Motion Detection
These devices are equipped with sensors that detect motion and move towards the source of movement for further inspection – all automatically by the way. I know it’s starting to sound like Hollywood stuff but hey! They aren’t called smart cameras for nothing.
In conjunction with the face tag feature, the system determines if the person is welcome there or not to determine if there is a need to notify you.
As a bonus, these systems come with night vision – most unwelcome visitors welcome themselves at night anyway.
Intelligent Systems in Industrial Settings
These systems have gained popularity in industrial settings a lot with a plethora of advantages over host-based systems. With the right applications, you can open up a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to inspection, measurements and just about any other vision-necessary application.
One advantage these systems offer is the sheer singularity in terms of units. In a basic industrial setting, there typically are numerous cameras interfaced to PCs which take up a lot of space.
These intelligent systems eliminate the need for all these connections and all these camera systems. They— for a fact—require much less space and as a bonus, they also streamline machine vision systems.
They also allow for localized pass/fail decision making, which is very important in intelligent transportation systems. In a nutshell, they provide high performance in compact, versatile packaging.