“Cameras are becoming terrifyingly smart.”
According to a new report, the smart camera era begins in 2019.
What does that mean?
Activate CEO Michael Wolf and his research team suggest there are three primary reasons to expect the emergence of the smart camera over the next year or so:
- Visual intelligence
- Functionality
- Networked
In the presentation which you can read here, the team predicts “that 58% of cars and 53% of homes will have cameras. The average American will have 12 cameras across all of their devices.”
Things like facial recognition, enabling for example security teams to identify individuals in a crowded public space, will continue to create tension with privacy advocates. Given that pretty much anyone who carries a modern day smartphone already has a smart camera with them, we can expect this trend to likely amplify.
I’d add that a few factors will create the perfect storm in this market segment: low cost cameras, the cloud, integrated apps. Since prices continue to drop it’s more economically feasible to put cameras everywhere — in cars, around the home. With pervasive internet, this data can be centralized into the cloud. And apps can integrate it and add real smarts to the process so that we can not only get alerts about security breaches, but also benefit from machine learning and AI which could predict future issues or behaviors based on past data.
Why do I feel like somebody’s always watching me…?