Using Artificial Intelligence and wearable glasses, a Singaporean company turns normal cell phones into powerful facial recognition tools
A Force Report
Seventh Sense Artificial Intelligence, a Singapore based, video-analytics company, is offering its on-premise servers and its recently released Agent 7 Android app, to India’s security establishment.
The Chief Software Architect (CSA) of Seventh Sense Artificial Intelligence, Varun Chatterji told FORCE, “We offer a license and support to up to five users per organization, for a free 30-day trial.” Seventh Sense is funded by 500 start-ups and is in the process of closing its Series A round with US and Singapore based investors. Among Seventh Sense’s backers is Cap Vista – the strategic investment arm of Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), a statutory board under Singapore’s Ministry of Defence.
The mobile app Agent 7, shares a central command dashboard with Module 7, a body-worn facial recognition system. Together, the mobile app and the body worn module, can spot and recognize faces. All necessary algorithms are computed on small, hand held devices. This system can be deployed if necessary on drones, for recognition and tracking.
Seventh Sense delivers extremely high-grade machine vision performance, on easily available hardware such as CPUs, mCPUs, embedded systems and compute-constrained edge devices. It lets end-users run computationally intensive Artificial Intelligence (AI), without the need for expensive Graphic Processor Units (GPUs) or internet clouds.
Chatterji adds, “Seventh Sense has an approved patent in the US in 2020. There are very few people in the world doing edge analytics at the same level as us. We run 199 images per second for certain kinds of algorithms. To make these big algorithms run on small, constrained power devices is not easy. One close competitor in the US was able to achieve only 83 images per second, while we achieved 199. We only relied on hardware optimization and used it to the best of its advantages, without resorting to software-based techniques, thus maintaining accuracy.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has several benefits. Since we run the images on a smaller device, AI helps it run on low power, enabling it to be portable.
The system comes at an affordable cost. Chatterji says, “If you run a GPU server, it consumes a larger amount of electricity. Second cost is bandwidth cost, if you stream data to the cloud, you incur bandwidth cost on the data. The third cost is that of computing, which is literally the cost of running the system. So, we save on three costs—electricity, bandwidth, and hardware,”
Seventh Sense has partnered with ST Engineering in Singapore. The company has so far worked with Housing & Development Board, Excelpoint, Singtel, Intercorp, Ionixx, Wipro and FSTD (Future Solutions Technology Division).
The face recognition capability in the system enables recognition of faces across ‘ages, genders and races.’ Faces that may have glasses, beards or masks on can also be recognized.
Seventh Sense’s API7 FR Engine provides Ease of Integration, Accuracy, Low Cost and Data Security. The Application Programming Interface (API) can be easily integrated into existing products such as building management system, access control and attendance system. The data is stored locally in the system, which means, the user using the system, owns the data solely.
In case of accuracy, the company has globally secured the 15th rank in unconstrained, in the wild, non-cooperative images.
The Agent 7 Mobile FR App enables face search and gives access to an unlimited database. This can be used by security personnel to stop intruders from intruding. The app can also be used to match against an identity document or take a picture from a surveillance stream and match that picture against a list of persons of interest (gallery).
The Edge AI body camera / portable device, another solution that the company is offering does not need network connectivity for recognition. It can recognize multiple faces in a single frame, and if the database gets stolen, the data deletes itself. The storage remains unlimited.
Chatterji explains the entire working of the system. “For instance,”, he says, “when a person wearing the glasses sees different faces, the registered or already stored faces in the device draw a match. This ultimately leads to recognition. While these faces come to be recognized, the system issues alerts. The system comes with a central dashboard which enables you to see the list of devices out there and where they are currently. One can select an image locally too, from within the system to match it to a required face, of ‘persons of interest’ enrolled within the system.”
What is different about the product? The products that Seventh Sense offers are portable. The system is battery powered and has fewer size, weight, or power restrictions.
The company wants to make a dent in the Indian market, selling to both, government and private security establishments. There is a licensing system to buy the product, which ensures that the product won’t be used for nefarious purposes by groups or individuals.
If you are interested in evaluating Seventh Sense’s technology, write to sales@seventhsense.ai to obtain a trial license.