Not all Smart Video Doorbells protect user’s homes the same way
What makes Smart Video Doorbells ‘smart’ are their video analytics and AI capabilities, such as motion detection, face detection, Face Recognition, and anomaly detection.
Having a good Smart Video Doorbell isn’t just about having the latest gadget. It’s about adding a layer of security to one’s home.
But not all Smart Video Doorbells can protect users’ homes in the same way. For example, not all detection technology can do Face Recognition, and motion detection has its own security limitations.
With motion detection, analysis involves real-time movements but cannot detect whether what’s causing the motion is a person, a pet, or a branch swaying in the breeze.
While this can be improved by adding human shape detection, Smart Video Doorbells are significantly enhanced by incorporating Face Recognition technology.
With Face Recognition, Smart Video Doorbells can notify users if someone unknown to them is lurking around their home. In contrast, persons known to the user can have their pictures added to a list of authorized identities for fast, easy authentication.
Now, let’s discover the advantages and limitations of motion detection and explore how upgrading the tech within Smart Video Doorbell products dramatically bumps up the home security features companies can offer their customers.
Motion detection for Smart Video Doorbells
Motion detection is a basic feature in most Smart Video Doorbells. It’s designed to detect moving objects in a specific area and create an alert.
Advanced motion detection systems can also analyze the type of motion picked up by cameras and characterize it as vehicles, people, pets, etc.
Motion detection is made possible with HD cameras that automatically record when movement is detected. This footage is either stored in the cloud or locally on the device.
Despite its security benefits, more than motion detection is needed.
Users want their Smart Video Doorbells to provide them with more detailed information, and they want to avoid bulk notifications and unnecessary alerts.
Smart Video Doorbells with AI offer better home protection
Market preferences for Smart Video Doorbells indicate a higher demand for artificial intelligence (AI) integration.
AI enhances the security and convenience of Smart Video Doorbell products, and some AI-enabled doorbells even offer Edge inference capabilities. When Smart Video Doorbells have Edge AI onboard, the result is more accurate and efficient detection at a lower cost.
Edge AI, in general, is growing in popularity as it provides a solution to the limitations of cloud-based AI.
By combining AI and Edge computing, Edge AI allows data to be processed and analyzed without ever leaving the device. This reduces bandwidth consumption and latency, saves on cloud processing costs, and enables video doorbells to run without network connectivity.
The 3 main benefits of Edge AI for Smart Video Doorbells
Processing data on Smart Video Doorbells with Edge AI brings many benefits. Here are the top three:
1. Edge AI offers efficiency, speed, and lower costs for Smart Video Doorbells
Because Edge AI does AI work on-device, it offers excellent performance and delivers real-time alerts. It also costs less than continuously paying for bandwidth usage and cloud storage.
2. Edge AI enhances privacy in Smart Video Doorbell products
Edge AI also offers enhanced privacy protection by limiting data transmission.
When AI works onboard a Smart Video Doorbell device (instead of the cloud), your customers’ personally identifiable information is less likely to fall into the wrong hands.
This is because data is most vulnerable to hacking when in transit, so removing the need for data to travel off-device significantly improves privacy.
Locally processing data also allows users to manage their personal information at the source, easily turning Face Recognition features on or off and enabling data masking.
Data masking protects sensitive information and refers to using pseudonyms, scrubbing, redaction, and de-identification measures to safeguard a person’s data.
3. Edge AI allows Smart Video Doorbells to function offline
Another cost-effective, energy-saving feature of Edge AI is its offline functionality.
Edge AI doesn’t rely on a network connection to be fully operational, so it’s perfectly suited to long-lasting, battery-powered use cases and devices. This means users don’t have to worry about power interruptions or network failures when using their Smart Video Doorbell products.
This feature also ensures that Edge AI is incredibly robust and can function virtually anywhere.
Video analytics brings huge benefits to Smart Video Doorbells
Video analytics is the concept of intelligently processing data from video footage, and it’s a massive game changer for Smart Video Doorbells.
Video analytics is the technology that identifies objects and classifies them as a person, package, animal, or vehicle. It can also detect suspicious or unexpected occurrences, which is known as anomaly detection.
From this intelligent data gathered via video analytics, Smart Video Doorbell devices can deliver alerts whenever the camera picks up a particular activity, rendering random, bulk alerts a problem of the past!
Now, users don’t have to constantly check and evaluate their video footage because the AI is doing it for them. Customers can rest easy knowing that they will receive instant alerts about the things that are important to them.
Face Recognition takes Smart Video Doorbells to the next level
Face Recognition has been utilized mainly for security and privacy purposes. For example, many people use Face Recognition to unlock their phones, tablets, and laptops, which ensures that only the right person can access the information on those devices.
But Face Recognition is coming to everyday consumers in another significant way – through HomeCams and Smart Video Doorbells.
Face analysis algorithms enable video doorbells to recognize the people who belong to a household. So rather than getting a ‘person detected’ alert, users can now know the person’s identity at their door (providing that person has opted in).
At the same time, Face Recognition allows users to turn off alerts for certain people when they’re detected at the door. This way, users never end up accidentally spying on their partners or adult children.
Instead of providing simple motion alerts (or advanced motion alerts), Face Recognition answers the question everyone wants to know – “Who’s at my door?”
Smart Video Doorbells can learn normal behavior and detect anomalies
AI, Video Analytics, and Face Recognition are expanding from attaching names to faces to learning types of behavior and recognizing when these behaviors deviate from the norm.
This is known as anomaly detection.
While Smart Video Doorbells aren’t capable of anomaly detection just yet, the capabilities mentioned above, in conjunction with Edge computing solutions, ensure that this technology is just around the corner.
Anomaly detection provides the ultimate home security. It won’t be long before Smart Video Doorbells can alert customers to suspicious activity around their homes while looking out for problems like fires, flooding, and other disasters that can threaten their property.
Smart Video Doorbell companies should consider their AI strategy
As we’ve explored, there can be considerable variation in Smart Video Doorbell products and the security they offer end-users.
By incorporating technologies like Edge AI, video analytics, and Face Recognition, Smart Video Doorbell providers can offer their customers an advanced home security solution that’s cost-effective, user-friendly, and exceptionally accurate.
It’s also important to note that anomaly detection (which is partly enabled by the advanced Smart Video Doorbell features listed above) will become increasingly popular and offer the best front door protection on the market.
For these reasons, companies doing motion detection (and even advanced motion detection) must consider their AI strategy to stay competitive.
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