In a move to bolster the robust nature of its cloud video surveillance and analytics solution, Eagle Eye Networks has added one of the global pioneers of video surveillance AI to its technology family this week with the acquisition of Uncanny Vision. The goal of the Uncanny Vision acquisition was two-fold; accelerating the company’s leadership in providing AI and analytics to make customers’ businesses more efficient and the opportunity to extend its global footprint with research and development capabilities and a new regional office in Bangalore, India.
Dean Drako, Eagle Eye Networks CEO points out the importance of his company being an open platform that will interface and integrate with any and all camera-makers while offering advance AI capabilities and analytics across its platforms. This was one of the driving motivations for acquiring an innovative AI company like Uncanny Vision.
“We act as the pipes to get the video to the Cloud. We deal with security and cyber issues and the rest of the hard stuff. However, we seek out other people who can build on top of that. We're not changing that model now, but we've been working with several AI providers, probably 20... 30 of them, and we're going to continue doing that, of which the Uncanny team was one of those AI providers,” explains Drako, adding that some of the things Eagle Eye wanted to do internally and with its customer base in conjunction with the Uncanny Video solutions required that they be better capitalized. “We felt that the two of us would be better off if Uncanny was stronger and had more resources behind them. So, we decided to take our partnership up to a higher level and acquire them.”
Drako’s reasons for pursuing the acquisition were simple and set them apart from the other AI video affiliates Eagle Eye has worked with.
“There are a lot of companies that are great to work with and do good stuff with Eagle Eye, but this team was particularly interesting for two reasons. One, I believe they may be the first AI team that started and focused on video surveillance. They only do video surveillance. I started doing video surveillance about eight years ago, long before anybody else focused on AI for video surveillance. And if they're not the first to exclusively focus on it, they are very near the first,” says Drako. “They've developed a high level of expertise because video surveillance for AI is very different than most of the AI companies in Silicon Valley who were trying to do YouTube videos and commercials and all kinds of other non-related security surveillance video, then started doing surveillance video kind of after the fact.”
Drako admits that Eagle Eye evaluated more than a dozen AI companies, but when it began working with Uncanny Vision in 2020, it didn’t take long for his team to conclude that Uncanny Vision was the clear leader in surveillance AI, with award-winning AI technology deployed across thousands of locations, including Fortune 500 customers.
“Another thing that differentiated the Uncanny Vision team was their understanding of the algorithm, and the neural net, and the code that is implementing the comparison. It is much higher than most of the other teams we encountered. They understand training. They understand running TensorFlow, and they understand the math behind the neural network,” adds Drako. TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. TensorFlow is a symbolic math library based on data flow and differentiable programming.
“Uncanny Video is optimizing all of it, but they also understand how that math is implemented into machine code and into the instruction set of [the CPU] that they're targeting. They're able to get a level of performance and efficiency that we have not seen from many other teams,” Drako continues. “I think there are two places where we're seeing immediate applications and immediate product delivery to our customers -- and immediate means six to 12 months. The first is in license plate recognition technology. The Uncanny team has worked very heavily on it, and we benchmarked them against over a dozen other AI technologies. They were hands-down much higher in accuracy than any other solutions that we could put into test. Secondly, they have a really strong solution in object categorization, which is very performance-driven.”
The deal accelerates Eagle Eye’s plan, announced in November 2020, when the company raised funds from venture capital firm Accel, to dramatically reshape video surveillance.
Uncanny Vision’s deep learning algorithms enable recognition, identification, and prediction, improving business operations, customer service, and site safety. Uncanny Vision’s AI is used today in multiple applications, including:
- Smart parking
- Retail analytics
- Gate security
- Toll automation
- Smart cities
- ATM monitoring
- Worker safety
- Perimeter security
All 60 Uncanny Vision employees will be retained, and Eagle Eye plans to expand the Bangalore office. Eagle Eye is committed to supporting Uncanny Vision’s current customers and will continue to build its global infrastructure to provide the very best 24/7 support to its valued customers around the world.
Uncanny Vision co-founders, Ranjith Parakkal and Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy have joined the Eagle Eye leadership team. Parakkal says, “We share the Eagle Eye team’s vision to deliver advanced, cyber-secure AI cloud video surveillance offerings that transform video surveillance for businesses around the globe.”
About the author: Steve Lasky is the Editorial Director of Endeavor Business Media Security Group and a 34-year veteran of the security industry.
