Year: 2020

NEC Corporation is to provide a ‘Smart Hospitality Service’ utilizing facial recognition technology for ‘Sequence,’ a newly developed hotel brand by Mitsui Fudosan and Mitsui Fudosan Hotel Management. NEC’s ‘smart hospitality service’ helps ensure safe, secure, and efficient stays by utilizing facial recognition technology for a wide range of services including check-in, entering rooms and entertainment facilities, and making cashless payments. Each of these services helps improve the convenience of hotels, to relieve stress, and to promote a more comfortable experience and stay. The service links pre-registered facial information with reservation information in advance, allowing guests to complete check-in smoothly and simply with a tablet device equipped with facial recognition. Also, when entering their rooms, guests can unlock the door with just facial recognition, thereby eliminating the need for keys and the concern of having to replace them if they are lost or stolen. Check-in and Room Entry with Facial Recognition Facial recognition is at the core of NEC’s portfolio of biometric identification technologies, ‘Bio-IDiom,’ and utilizes NEC’s facial recognition AI engine ‘NeoFace,’ which has the world’s No.1 certification accuracy. This service will be available for registered guests who agree to the use of facial recognition. Facial information will not be saved nor used for verification without confirming a guest’s consent. In the future, NEC aims to expand the range of its ‘smart hospitality service,’ enabling guests to go sightseeing directly from the airport by checking-in through facial recognition and having baggage delivered to the hotel. NEC’s ‘smart hospitality service’ allows information on the status of people, things, and processes to be shared across the entire value chain, helping to realize ‘NEC value chain innovation.’  

Tennessee police department to utilize Rekor’s ‘plug-and-play’ vehicle recognition system and powerful Watchman software for license plate reads with up to 99% accuracy Rekor Systems, Inc., focused on bringing smarter, faster, cost-competitive solutions to the worlds of public safety and customer experience, has been selected by the City of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee (the City) and the Mt. Juliet Police Department (MJPD) to provide robust vehicle recognition solutions. The City and MJPD selected Rekor to roll out the community’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) program which the department is terming, ‘Guardian Shield.’ The Guardian Shield program was initiated to enhance the community’s safety by providing an additional tool to further protect and shield residents and visitors from criminals who enter the City to cause harm. Before selecting Rekor, MJPD and IT professionals conducted rigorous testing and an extensive review of Rekor and other leading license plate recognition systems. After testing was completed, the Rekor solutions clearly outperformed competitors. An alert generated from Rekor led to the successful apprehension of an armed and dangerous fugitive from a nearby county. Thirty-seven locations for fixed cameras have been identified that will provide the best possible coverage to protect the entire Mt. Juliet community. $89,000 has been budgeted per year and Rekor Systems will support the cameras pending successful final approvals. “Our number one priority is maintaining the safety of our community, and we are always looking for robust tools and technologies that can help us to do so. Rekor’s Edge and Watchman vehicle recognition technology provided better results than its competition during our trial period. Importantly, it proved its value immediately during testing by helping us to catch a wanted fugitive and take a dangerous man off the streets,” said James Hambrick, Chief, MJPD, “With higher accuracy than other providers, as well as the ability to affordably scale, Rekor’s solutions fit the needs of our department both now and for the future. We look forward to working with Rekor to make Mt. Juliet and the surrounding communities a safer place.” As a part of its subscription, and at no additional cost, the MJPD will have the choice of sharing data with the Rekor Public Safety Network (RPSN). Any state or local law enforcement agency participating in the RPSN will be able to access real time data from any part of the network at no cost. The Company is initially launching the network by aggregating vehicle data from customers in over 30 states. With thousands of automatic license plate reading cameras currently in service that capture approximately 30 million plate reads per week, the network is expected to be live in the first quarter of 2020. “We are proud to partner with MJPD and to win a significant law enforcement contract through a vigorous bid competition. The selection of Rekor’s Edge and Watchman technologies – as well as the capture of a wanted suspect due to an alert from our system in testing – further validates our vehicle recognition systems as the preferred market solutions,” said Robert A. Berman, President and CEO, Rekor, “Our unparalleled vehicle recognition accuracy and scalability, combined with our cost-effective systems, enable law enforcement agencies of all sizes the ability to implement robust technologies that can positively impact the public safety of their communities. We are gratified to add another law enforcement agency to our Rekor Public Safety Network, and to continue our work in public safety across the country.” Rekor’s software and cameras can be deployed to support law enforcement without long installation delays. Rekor’s solution can be used to collect license plate data and information such as the make, type, and color of a vehicle. This can represent substantial savings compared to traditional optical character recognition license plate reading technology.  

Genetec Security Center Transaction Finder, a PoS (Point of Sale) integration tool with exception-based reporting capabilities has been designed to help retailers speed up their investigations. Embedded in the security system, Security Center Transaction Finder correlates PoS data with corresponding video, with the ability to bring in additional sources such as analytics, as an added feature. It eliminates the need to jump between different platforms, and helps investigators filter through large volumes of transactions to quickly detect suspicious activities that might warrant further investigation. Retail shrink is increasing, and theft tactics are becoming more complex, strategic and internal. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2019 national retail security survey, theft, fraud and losses from other retail ‘shrink’ continues to rise (totaling $50.6 billion in 2018, up from $46.8 billion the year before). To identify theft trends and combat loss, retailers are increasingly turning to technology to put in place effective ways to work smarter and automate their processes to reduce losses and preserve valuable margin. “Working with a variety of tools and applications to reduce retail loss is a critical aspect of any retail investigator’s job. However, the enormous volume of PoS transactions to review, combined with the amount of time it takes to manually find the security video associated with potentially fraudulent activity makes this a daunting task. With Transaction Finder, we solve that problem by using a single tool that makes it easy to detect theft trends, identify suspicious transactions and locate video of interest,” explained Rob Borsch, Practice Leader – Retail and Banking at Genetec, Inc. Using the Transaction Finder task in Security Center, investigators simply enter relevant search criteria like date and time, employee name, SKUs involved in the transaction, void transactions, or whether motion was detected on the customer side of the register etc. Transaction Finder will scan the PoS database for activities that meet the selected criteria along with the associated video and the transaction details. Using customizable dashboards, investigators can quickly identify suspicious transactions, immediately review the associated video for more context, and flag transactions for further investigation.  

When Swinkels Family Brewers wanted to unify its access control internationally, it chose Nedap AEOS, which enabled this producer of world-famous Bavaria beer to design a system around the people using it. The challenge Swinkels Family Brewers had grown quickly and needed to review its security and apply more stringent measures. It was using two access control systems and wanted to unite everything on one platform. Most importantly, Swinkels Family Brewers wanted a system that would match its people-first approach, and provide the flexibility to adapt and scale in the future. What they did Initially, Swinkels Family Brewers established a cross-department project group, which developed a new security policy. With that in place, the project group identified AEOS as the system to meet its long and growing list of requirements. During the planning stages, they consulted department managers on their needs, and before AEOS was implemented they ensured their people knew what to expect and why the change was happening.  Key benefits The system is designed around the people using it. Security is stronger but there’s a welcoming sense of warmth and openness. One unified system fulfils all access control needs. Several systems are linked to AEOS and updates transfer automatically. Flexibility to easily add new functionality such as video monitoring, or scale the system. What they said Stefan Fehlhaber, Facility Manager at Swinkels said, “We’re very impressed with the scalability, stability and robustness of AEOS. It’s very practical to use in daily life and is easy for our security people to operate. It’s also very convenient for our employees to be able to use one badge at different locations.”