We developed Face Detector in 2018 and provided it under a fee-based license. This functionality was created for one of our partners which offer ATM management software. Viinex solution was used to detect a face in a video stream from an ATM USB camera and allowed to transmit on transaction a part of a JPG frame with the face to any face recognition analytics system chosen by the bank. The most relevant frame for further processing in video analytics systems was picked by Viinex on the best confidence parameters of face detector, based on eyes position and frontal position of the face in every frame of a video buffer formed by Viinex, according to pre and post record settings, after a request from ATM management software.
In some time this usage scenario turned out to be needed in retail chain that wanted to guess customers’ preferences. The client had several points of sales and wanted to transmit frames with customers faces to owned data center for further face recognition. For each face a unique digital identifier was formed without personal identification or personal data, and then it was linked to client’s CRM where purchase history and preferences were stored. In this case it was technically difficult to set up a transmission of an outgoing video stream to the data center using communication channels with different quality, rented from various Internet providers. Viinex solution was important because we had managed to optimize the size of transmitted video data by means of sending only a part of the JPEG frame with a customer’s face in necessary quality for video analytics. The size of such file is several kilobytes, and it’s much easier to transmit it in comparison with outgoing video stream measured in megabits per second. This way Face Detector served as a filter that allowed receiving only necessary data for further processing by a video analytics system in data center. Besides, our product gave a free hand to the client as to what cloud face recognition service to choose – since it was using standard JPEG files with necessary quality, it could technically interact with any remote video analytics system which was able to work with JPEG images.
From Jan 1, 2020, we offer Face Detector free of charge as an integral part of Viinex basic video analytics which is available with every license for video stream connection.