Day: September 28, 2018

The key of the future is digital, and it offers more features than its analog predecessors – impossible to lose or steal, and there is never a need to search for it. That is because it is stored securely and specifically for each user in a smartphone app. “Our Perfectly Keyless app is making conventional vehicle keys a thing of the past. Bosch is taking the car key into the digital realm and making it available anywhere, anytime,” says Harald Kröger, President of the Bosch Automotive Electronics division. With Perfectly Keyless, the smartphone replaces the analog vehicle key. This concept can offer owners of private vehicles increased convenience, but where it really shines is in vehicle fleets with multiple drivers. No more key handovers – fleet managers and logistics providers simply use the app to give drivers access to the vehicles. “Bosch’s digital vehicle key gives fleets a boost towards greater connectivity,” Kröger says. The company believes there is a huge market for its solution, which is making its world debut at the IAA Commercial Vehicles in Hannover. The potential customers include some 15,000 logistics providers in Germany alone. Most of them manage at least a dozen vehicles and drivers. A keyless journey Row upon row of hundreds of keys hanging on large boards – logistics providers still often use this method to organize the keys to their fleet vehicles. A missing key triggers a massive search operation. But every minute counts, especially with commercial vehicles. After all, if a truck isn’t moving, it’s not making any money. At the core of the new system is an app that dispatchers and truck drivers both have on their phones. This makes it possible to grant vehicle access with just a few clicks. In the future, the Bosch solution will also allow logistics providers to completely integrate digital key management into their dispatch and scheduling systems. As soon as dispatch is assigned drivers and trucks to a route, the system automatically generates digital keys for the vehicles and sends them to the drivers’ smartphones. If the route scheduling changes, the software adjusts the keys accordingly. “Thanks to Bosch’s fully digital key management, logistics providers enjoy both security and flexibility in their planning. This is the only way the logistics of the future will be able to function efficiently,” Kröger says. Secure key management with app and cloud Bosch digital key management connects trucks and the smartphone app via the cloud. Dispatchers or fleet managers use the app to assign a truck to a driver for a particular route. Perfectly Keyless generates a personal, secure digital key and sends it via the cloud to the truck and to the driver’s smartphone. As the driver approaches the assigned truck, the sensors installed in the truck detect the smartphone via a wireless connection. The vehicle doors will open only if the key on the phone ‘fits’ the digital lock in the vehicle. These sensors can also tell when the driver is in the driver’s seat, and the engine starts up as soon as the driver presses the start-stop button. When the driver gets out of the car at the end of the journey, the system detects this and automatically locks the doors. Battery dead – No problem But what happens if the smartphone’s battery dies, or the device has gone missing? In the future, the vehicle key in the smartphone will work even if the phone battery is dead. In that case, the phone and truck will communicate using near-field communication (NFC), a wireless protocol for sharing data over short distances. Bosch plans to make it the ‘double hull’ of its solution. If the smartphone is lost or stolen, and the app with it, the digital key can be simply deactivated online, thus blocking access to the vehicle. It cannot be opened and started until the fleet manager uses the app to provide another driver or a new phone with access to the truck.

Dahua Technology’s state-of-the-art facial recognition solution enhances safety and business intelligence for its users. In real life a person rarely wants to be seen as someone other than himself. The misrecognition problem is not only time consuming, dignity compromising, but also life threatening in lots of cases where certain dangerous people are not correctly identified in time. This mistake is no longer affordable to make in today’s context, whether for an individual, a group, or the society as a whole. Fortunately the facial recognition technology has matured and the security solution based on the technology is being widely used across the world. Dahua Technology is especially good in this realm and it has been proved by multiple championships and new records made in major international challenges including multiple object tracking challenge, the KITTI 2D object detection evaluation 2012, KITTI flow benchmark, Task [word recognition] of incidental scene text challenge and Born-digital image challenge. It is necessary to explain some basic rules concerning how facial recognition works before the tour to see how Dahua Technology’s products & solutions are applied in various daily scenes. Simply put, big data is useless if the accuracy and efficiency of facial recognition has not been improved to certain levels. The face detection, whether from a snapshot or from a stream of video, requires not only a high-quality camera but more importantly, a smart AI algorithm that optimizes the image captured in multiple angles or blurred in motion, and translates the face feature into digital model which can be crosschecked in the database. The whole process, from taking the picture to comparison, takes as short as 300ms. Suppose there is a Tom, a middle level manager in his mid-30s. Let’s follow Tom for a day and see how Dahua Technology’s facial recognition solution plays its role in his perfectly ordinary life. Tom vs. access control Tom hurried to his company on the 30th floor of a class A office building, the kind with additional barriers in the lobby between the front gate and elevators. There were long lines in front of the access control machines. Tom reached into his pocket and unfortunately found his access card wasn’t there. But Tom should not worry anymore because the building had just updated the security system with Dahua facial recognition solution, which overcame various shortcomings of traditional ways of card or fingerprint scanning including low efficiency and inadequate security. Comparing to a card, apparently it is much less likely for one to lose/ replicate/ borrow a face. The access control was no longer a gamble if one’s fingerprint works. Here is how exactly Dahua facial recognition solution works in this scene. The powerful cameras blessed with deep learning AI detect the faces and digitalize the features, and compare them purely through numbers with the ones in database which takes less than 1 second. The beauty of the solu tion goes both ways since the company no longer needs to make a card or import finger prints for the newly employed but simply upload their photos into the database that contains up to 10,000 faces. Besides offices, this solution can also be applied to any place that has a high standard for access control like customs, schools, residential communities etc. Tom on the white list Tom stepped into a bank. On behalf of his company, Tom had some serious business to discuss with the bank, which, at this hour, was full of people. Before Tom started to worry about the time to be spent waiting and if he could make it to the next meeting on time, he heard his last name called and was led into the VIP room. Now how did the bank manage to do that? Not by human efforts for sure. No clerk could remember each and every face and match it with a particular name and particular business without making any mistake. That’s why facial recognition solution is essential to the business. The immediate detection of a VIP face could be easily matched with the white list in database – no delay or misidentification and all VIP treatment. This goes not only for banks. Hotels, hospitals and casinos alike will also benefit from this solution that secures the proper respect those exceptional customers deserve. Tom unauthorized Tom went to the vault of the bank for the first time in his life. He was happy that now he was trusted by the company with such important mission. He walked fast and went in front of the escort. But before he could raise his hand to touch the door of vault, a warning siren was triggered. The escort, with a reassuring smile, caught up and patted on Tom’s shoulder and explained the whole situation to him. No unauthorized personnel, be it Tom or Jerry, could intrude the sensitive areas blessed with Dahua facial recognition solution. The face captured and automatically optimized by the camera would be put into real time comparison with the authorized faces in data base and the low percentage of similarity, from a pure mathematical point of view, would immediately trigger the alarm. Other limited access areas like labs and archives will also enjoy better protection with facial recognition solution. Tom and the black list After a long day’s work, Tom went to see a football game with a friend. The show began even before they entered the stadium because they saw an infamous football hooligan got rejected and taken away outside the entrance gate. Tom, who have been through plenty of adventures during the day figured out what had happened. Tom’s friend, who happened to be an employee of Dahua Technology, took the chance to explain how Dahua facial recognition solution informed the security force to deal with any persona non grata on the black list as soon as they showed their faces. Of course, this solution could be widely applied to other areas like airports, train stations, or in other words, city management. So, this was a day in Tom’s life,…