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App Challenge winners

Security & Safety Things has announced the three winners of its App Challenge, a contest designed to promote the development of innovative applications for smart cameras in the retail, manufacturing and transportation sectors. The winning apps provided a variety of solutions to help these vertical markets overcome new challenges as a result of COVID-19 conditions.

“With our open IoT platform as the foundation, these developers have proven that innovation can solve a host of problems that no one could have anticipated just a few months ago,” said Hartmut Schaper, chief operating officer, Security & Safety Things. “Provided with the right tools and framework, developers can continue to innovate on our platform and devise flexible solutions for one market that can be easily adapted to another. This App Challenge has served as an excellent representation of the Security & Safety Things approach.”

TNG Technology Consulting, based in Munich, Germany, received the highest rating in the retail/commercial building category for its ‘Hand Pose Detection – Visual Feedback’ application. This application provides a way for retailers to discern customer satisfaction using hand gestures and facial expression emojis. As facial protection is required for many retail stores, this app enables retailers to glean important customer satisfaction data in a different and customer-engaging way.

TNG also received the highest rating in the transportation and smart city category for its ‘Dynamic Privacy Mask’, which will anonymise sensitive data and can mask PIN pads, phones, laptops and humans to provide a greater level of privacy. This application offers relevant compliance to different data regulations and its ability to mask laptops using object segmentation will be particularly relevant in the future as data privacy laws are adjusted by region or country.

In the manufacturing and logistics category, Pittsburgh, USA-based Sparkline received the highest rating for its ‘Parcel Detection’ application. This solution will inform building owners when a package is left unattended in an undesirable location. This seeks to solve a pain point brought on by the lack of onsite staff in a variety of verticals, due to COVID-19. This application will also be useful to homeowners, as well as residents of multi-tenant facilities.

“We feel that the platform is a major improvement for customers. They can use apps matching their business case, without getting locked in to a vendor who provides software only for a limited number of use cases. In addition, moving video analytics from a central location to the cameras themselves saves resources and provides enormous scalability,” said Moritz Prinz, partner at TNG Technology Consulting.

“From a developer’s perspective, what we liked in particular was how easy it was to get set up with their system and to develop apps that scale well with the number of cameras,” added Mathias Burger, principal consultant at TNG.

These winners were chosen by a jury of experts including Securitas, G4S, Kings Secure Technologies, Bosch, Ateksis, Convergint Technologies, Vision Technologies, Prosegur and Security & Safety Things. At the start of the challenge, this jury reviewed submitted proposals and the best and most innovative proposals were selected to enter the App Challenge. The final and uploaded app results were then presented and demonstrated to the jury by each developer company, so that the jury was able to choose the best in each vertical.

As part of the App Challenge, 21 new AI-powered analytic apps will be loaded onto the company’s open Application Store, which already features more than 60 different applications from which integrators and end users can choose to suit their particular application for live projects. Using the Security & Safety Things OS, multiple applications are capable of running simultaneously on individual smart cameras so retailers, manufacturing facilities and transportation venues can accomplish several different functions with a single camera.

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