Milestone: from healthcare to smart city, video analysis looks increasingly beyond security

The main novelty that you announced at Mips2022 is the arrival in 2023 of the Kite platform, with which your video management services will also move to the cloud. Someone criticized the company for moving late on this front: what do you think?

“It’s true, like Milestone we have been criticized for not being the first in the sector to go to the cloud, but in a business like ours speed isn’t the only thing that matters, rather. Obviously we have been working on this front for some time: Kite is a platform that was developed by Arcules, a company spinoff of Milescone born from our research and development department. As a company with a very long history in terms of software services, the move to the cloud marks substantially an almost total reinventionwith a portfolio that will be complete by 2023. All this by bringing together cloud, big data, analytics software and edge computing, as video technology is increasingly data driven“.

Speaking of data, which you obviously have in abundance starting from the images collected, what are the uses that you consider most strategic today?

“While companies like Facebook and Amazon are wondering how to directly and best monetize the data they have, we work for extract useful information to our customers (corporate or institutional) and lead to concrete improvements and efficiencies. Let me give you an example: a city in North America asked us to reduce the urban traffic congestion in rush hour. From the analysis of the videos of the traffic monitoring cameras it was found that the traffic flows had a strong asymmetry, with north-south displacements much greater than east-west displacements. We then determined what the ideal timing of the traffic lights was to ensure the best possible flow, and the benefit was evident. Staying within the same example, let’s say smart city, thanks to the video technology already installed in our streets we can optimize the routes of emergency vehiclesand optimize the productivity of an entire city ”.

Among the most interesting areas of use there is undoubtedly the healthcare sector, with applications that – beyond the journeys of ambulances in the city – range from video analysis of support sessions to children with autism to automatic alert systems in operating room if the healthcare team makes some macroscopic mistake: but how do you manage with video analysis in an intrinsically delicate and highly regulated sector such as that of health?