By Yana Yelina
For the recent few years the WebRTC adoption in the business world has surged, and the worldwide pandemic has made this growth even more dramatic. Online education, telehealth services, multimedia broadcasting — these are only a few examples of how WebRTC application development has been making its mark.
The security sphere is no exception. WebRTC has always been one of the key enablers in surveillance, and in combination with advanced computer vision technologies, it has become an indispensable cog in the public safety machine.
What’s in store for personal security
A WebRTC-fueled app might be the optimal virtual companion for individuals on their way home through dangerous areas. When a simple video chat is not enough, such an app could start a law-latency video stream, allowing the peers located in other areas to accurately track what’s happening around the person who needs assistance.
Underpinned by powerful photo archiving capabilities, your security solution would periodically take pictures during the whole broadcast and send them to the peer’s device — thus creating great evidence in case an emergency happened (the phone was robbed or destroyed).
These photos — whether automatically taken under poor lightening or bad weather conditions — could be further processed by intelligent computer vision algorithms to detect and identify the intruders as well as create a detailed behavioral matrix.
Taking home safety up a notch
With a boom a couple of decades ago, smart home technology continues gaining traction. To wit, by 2023 the worldwide number of smart homes is expected to be 300 million, exceeding the $141 billion mark in revenue.
Besides introducing devices like smart lightning, temperature regulator, smart speakers, or intelligent refrigerators that keep track of the product stock, smart homes are key to ensuring rock-solid physical security.
A key technology enabler for smart home security, WebRTC can be smoothly integrated with IoT infrastructure components like CCTV cameras to provide smooth video streaming of what is happening inside and outside the house. This way, smart home owners can easily track all visitors and speak to them being at home as well as remotely control what’s happening around — when they’re away — and get timely alerts when unauthorized people are trying to enter the building.
Reducing anxiety in public places
Among other public safety areas where WebRTC is blazing a trail is urban surveillance. By combining real-time communication tech and computer vision mechanisms, police, emergency, and law enforcement services can achieve the new heights of efficiency. How?
Properly authorized users can leverage live streams to track all types of objects — including people, vehicles, and attributes — in real time and identify suspicious events. Loitering, turnstile cheating, intrusion, object abandonment, abnormal driving, violence, gunshot capture, explosion — computer vision can accurately detect these and other events, thus empowering the corresponding institutions to act accordingly.
Moreover, advanced video post-processing can help cut the investigation time by turning previously unusable images into hard evidence in the critical time period after a crime has been committed. However, take into account the fact that the more images the algorithms had used for training, the more accurate the results will be.
On a final note
With its ability to transmit thousands of real-time video streams across cities, WebRTC can significantly contribute to ensuring personal security, smart home safety, and public surveillance. Namely, its smooth integration with CCTVs and computer vision systems, enables accurate detection of suspicious individuals, vandalism, disaster, and other threats — making the public square a safer place.
About the author
Yana Yelina is a Technology Writer at Oxagile, a software development company based in the USA. Her articles have been featured on KDNuggets, ITProPortal, Datafloq, Techwell, and more. Yana is passionate about the untapped potential of technology and explores the perks it can bring businesses of every stripe. You can reach Yana at yana.yelina@oxagile.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
Picture Source: medium.com
