About AI Surveillance

AI Surveillance is one of South Africa’s fastest-growing remote CCTV monitoring companies providing

• White-label CCTV monitoring to security service providers
• Live monitoring-as-a-service direct to end customers

The company’s primary focus is on shopping centres, retail environments and the industrial sector. It also provides critical off-site surveillance monitoring open public areas to create safer cities, very much focussed on a B-to-B approach. AI Surveillance customers face multiple security threats on a daily basis, ranging from assault, shoplifting, stock theft through to armed robberies, cash-in-transit theft, perimeter intrusion and public disorder.

The challenge

The challenge AI Surveillance’s market-leading reputation for excellence has spread quickly, creating a rapidly growing demand for their services and an ever-increasing number of CCTV cameras to monitor effectively and cost efficiently.

According to Rob Nichol, AI Surveillance Founder & CEO, nothing can fully replace the human eye. Experienced human operators in security control rooms always have to be at the centre of his company’s solution.

To provide their exceptional service to clients, AI Surveillance employs the very best CCTV monitoring staff. All potential employees are background-checked and rigorously assessed at interview. Training courses are thorough and the number of cameras each employee has to monitor is minimised to guarantee the highest possible levels of incident detection. As a part of achieving this control room staff are not asked to work long shifts.

However, the key to effective and cost efficient monitoring is an AI technology solution that enhances the control room operator’s performance in monitoring and effectively processing large, exponentially increasing volumes of video input.

The only possible action here is preventive: detecting the intruders and capturing them before they leave. The problem is that both on-camera and centralised server video analytics solutions used to protect the solar farms have proven unable to detect intrusions when executed using the aforementioned strategies.

To complicate matters for the video monitoring centre, these same solutions typically create hundreds of thousands of false positive alarms per month since they are extremely sensitive to environmental noise. This makes the task of detecting a true alarm practically impossible, as it is embedded within thousands of false ones.

The solution: IntelexVision iSentry system

To cope with the increased demand, AI Surveillance needed to find a way to further improve on control room incident detection performance.

After completing their due diligence, the company chose the iSentry software system from IntelexVision.

iSentry removes the need for an operator to watch live video or for only pre-determined events to generate alarms to the control room. With its advanced AI technology, iSentry watches 100% of video and autonomously detects potential incidents.

When a potential incident is detected, for example a suspicious or unusual behaviour or movement, iSentry generates an alert for automatic system evaluation and sends relevant instant alerts in just milliseconds to control room staff. After reviewing that specific alert video, an experienced AI Surveillance operator can make a real-time judgement on whether it needs escalating