Modern Building Services

28 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES OCTOBER 2022 FEATURE SMART BUILDINGS Smart buildings need smart objectives With smart buildings comes the need for smart objectives. As a building owner or facilities manager, you first need to know what your primary objectives are, to ensure you implement the best combination of technologies to achieve those objectives. Identifying the criteria that are most critical to you and your building and ensuring that they complement each other will give you a solid foundation. Fuel, for instance, has become a massive subject for everybody. Most businesses will have long standing carbon footprint targets they are striving to meet. Having smarter buildings that control energy consumption and keep levels to a minimum is even more important to businesses now with the soaring fuel prices. Of course, the objectives you set will vary depending on the type of building you have. Do you have a commercial building or a residential building? Do you have an urbanised building or a semi-rural building? They are all going to have different wants and needs that should be considered in order to achieve ultimate optimisation and ensure that the building performs at its best. Emerging security technology One of the security solutions is a video management system (VMS) that brings ultra-smart technology to buildings. The way it works is by taking a variety of video elements and sitting them on a platform that has multiple plugins, or analytics. For instance, if you have automated number plate recognition (ANPR) on a building, it might open the garage to employees, residents or logged guests, so that only the right people gain access to park. It might be that as well as ANPR you want facial recognition so, if a car turns up and is parked, you can check that the driver of that car is an employee or another known person. Facial recognition has been around since the mid-1960s, but where it has been approximately 70% accurate in the past, today it is virtually infallible. According to recent research by CSIS 2 , the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, modern facial recognition systems are now 99.97% accurate. You could growa beard, change your hair colour andwear glasses and facial recognition systemswould still identify you, because the algorithms have been immaculately refined to recognise all matter of things, including the length of your nose, the depth of your eyes, and the width of your mouth. It takes hundreds of measurements from all over your face to map you and identify who you are. With our VMS you can take the facial recognition plugin and place it on the same platform as your ANPR plugin. By adding multiple plugins and layers of intelligence and contextualising them, you by definition enrich your data – this greater insight is what helps create a smart building. One of the trial siteswe are using for our pilot study is a power plant. They have areaswhich are restricted access andwhere PPE equipment is mandatory, for example rooftops. If you have cameras up there, theVMS is perfectly capable of identifying an unauthorised person – someone that is not wearing a hard hat or a high visibility vest. It can then deliver by PA a voice command to alert the person to vacate the roof immediately, otherwise, an alarm will sound. It is a highly intelligent systemthat can be programmedwith a series of smart rules and deployed almost anywherewithin a building. Ensuring high quality analytics That said, the analytics is only as good as the image it receives. If you have an old camera that produces a furry image, it is not going to be able to measure your face with the preciseness it needs for facial recognition, or whether your hair is red or black, or whether you are wearing a high visibility vest. For analytics to work effectively it needs a high quality IP image. A new camera will operate effectively virtually anywhere, even in lower light levels, but not even the newest of cameras support ‘no light’ – so if you have really badly lit areas, analytics is likely to struggle. Where an old intruder alarm system will sound an alarm when someone is breaking in – it won’t say who is breaking in, or which window. In contrast, a VMS system will identify both who is breaking in and the exact location, for instance, the third window on the first floor in the canteen – it is all about enriching and contextualising data. The future for smart security In 2019, IHS Markit 3 predicted that there would be 1 billion surveillance cameras by the end of 2021 – and that London would be among the top 10 surveilled cities in the world with 127,373 cameras for 9,540,576 people; that is 13.35 cameras per 1,000 people. Althoughwe are someways behind Chinawhich takes the number one spot with 540million cameras for 1.46 billion people (372.8 cameras per 1,000 people), the UK is still a driving force in the development of smart building security. Looking ahead it is likely we will see more of what we have but better – better pictures, delivered quicker and cheaper, and in more areas. Video and video packets will also be used a lot more in the future. We are living in an age where consumers want to stream data repeatedly to their mobile devices, which has been enabled by the move from 4G to 5G. The world is increasingly demanding simple, instant video commands and visual alerts that leave no room for misinterpretation and this applies to security technology. Where do 5G and 6G take us? It takes us to the constant moving of data, instructions, and commands via the web and keeps us connected – connected to other people and connected to our smart buildings. Sources 1 www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/ industry-reports/smart-building- market-101198 2 https://tinyurl.com/ycyfn4uf 3 www.comparitech.com/ vpn-privacy/the-worlds- most-surveilled-cities More information can be found at www.chubbfiresecurity.com/ en/uk