Exhibition of Achievements of the “Internet of Things”. Innolabs VIS CAST and Kraftway Smart Video Camera

^{Photo: Yulia Lunina}
Throughout 2015, the topic of the “Internet of Things” did not leave Intel's GeekTimes blog pages - in fact, it became the main one here. Since the technology is relatively new, IoT posts were mostly educational. However, you should not classify IoT as “always promising” - and this was proved once again by Intel, having conducted in mid-December a review of devices that are now ready to become components of the “Internet of Things”.
The event was attended by several domestic developers. We already wrote about some of them, let’s say, a whole post was devoted to the health monitoring device from FRUKT MD . This time we’ll talk about two more interesting projects, in our opinion: the VIS CAST wireless voice broadcasting system and the Kraftway Smart Video Camera.

Innolabs VIS CAST

When designing the interior for various kinds of public places, such as shopping centers, conference rooms, public transport, cafes, and so on, one has to solve a typical problem: how to broadcast entertainment and information services only to those who need them and not disturb others. Say a TV is in the lobby of the airport; Some of the expectants want to listen to him, but some do not. They learned to solve this problem more or less only in the case of fixed seats: there you can equip headphone jacks. And what to do in other cases?



Elegant and modern solution offers startup Innolabs. VIS CAST is a broadcast wireless audio broadcast. The console on the Intel Edison platform works as a Wi-Fi access point. By connecting to this network, the user through a web browser, without any special applications, gets access to the audio stream, which can be multilingual. To facilitate navigation, you can use NFC or iBeacon tags.

The technology does not require any unnecessary movements on the part of the user and is able to provide up to 100 simultaneous connections to one device. There are, however, some difficulties. Firstly, in the current implementation, the video being played should be uploaded to the developer's resource. Secondly, all the problems with voice transmission technology have not been resolved, each tried out one has some shortcomings. Nevertheless, this is a real, ready-to-eat product that can make our life more convenient in something.

Kraftway Smart Video Camera

Millions of digital video cameras have been installed worldwide, combined into tens of thousands of services. Together they shoot video with terrible speed, occupying petabytes of storage data. However, who is watching this video? Yes, when the thunder strikes, the archives rise and are studied, but shouldn’t it have been done before, when an emergency could have been prevented? “You can’t put a person to every cell,” you say. Of course, there is no man. But an intelligent module with certain capabilities is perhaps possible. This is the idea behind the Kraftway Smart Video Camera.



KSVC consists of two modules: standard functional video cameras and a video server that implements advanced features. Both of them are built on the basis of the Intel Atom E3845 processor; accordingly, the camera uses the ISP and GPU of this SoC, and the server uses the central processing unit (CPU). Pre-processing and encoding of video is carried out by hardware SoC.

Obviously, the value of KSVC for the Internet of things is determined by the capabilities of the integrated video server. To date, its functionality is as follows:

• Video analytics to detect intruders and critical situations;
• Video archiving in the built-in secure storage 2.5 ”SSD;
• Protecting video from network interception, the ability to encrypt video;
• Remote monitoring of the technical condition of the camera;
• And something else.

The most interesting of these is, of course, analytical capabilities. What can a camera detect without human intervention? The developers give an exhaustive answer: camera manipulations (exposure, dimming, defocusing, overriding, pollution, etc.), motion detection, face detection, perimeter control (object crossing the barrier, being in the restricted area, inappropriate behavior, falling or running people), control of mass clusters (the appearance of foreign objects in the crowd, the disappearance of objects), recognition of car numbers, collection of statistics on objects.

Here it is not a question of the convenience of life, but its safety. Great idea, we hope for its development.

Literally right after the New Year holidays, we will continue the story about new devices for the “Internet of Things” on the Intel platform and show an example of how hackathons conducted by the company can shorten the path from idea to product.

Happy New Year!