Panasonic’s surveillance solution masks out people and private zones

Object surveillance in companies strongly links to privacy topics. This complex is now solved by new software: Panasonic’s Privacy Protection Solution. It is able to mask customers and employees. This means that you can see the movement of masked objects via silhouettes and surveil specific areas at the same time.

Controversial Privacy Issues
Being a logistics entrepreneur, surveillance for warehouses and stocks seems necessary. As a manager of a bank you may want to monitor your waiting rooms or transactions on your counters. However you do not want your clients, customers or employees to feel controlled.

The need to protect people's privacy in order to protect the assets of the business becomes a big topic. Backed by social problems caused by the unintended leaking of personal information, there is a growing trend in recent years to protect people's privacy. A single invasion of privacy can cause losing the business assets. It is quite common to assume that security cameras, which are used to monitor people, are not intended to protect privacy. And if privacy is taken into consideration, monitoring becomes impossible.

The legal situation supports the whole controversy: Surveillance images that identify individuals are strictly controlled by law! The EC-Federal Data Protection Act has already become hard national German law. The influence of legal authorities will become extremely strong from 2016 onward. This act has to become national law in all EU countries at some future date.

Panasonic’s Privacy Protection Solution
The Panasonic security system developed a solution that is able to mask only the customers and employees within the image. And when you want to remove the privacy restrictions due to the occurrence of some kind of trouble, the image can be viewed without the masking. The part to be monitored is captured while protecting the privacy of customers and employees. This is Panasonic’s Privacy Protection Solution. So users can have privacy protection and surveillance at the same time.

How is it working?
The MOR (Moving Object Removal) function masks moving objects, and blacks out areas that one definitely wants to conceal. In contrast, it can remove the MOR function for areas that want to be monitored with high precision.

And it can protect privacy in scenes that you want to monitor. This means that you can see the movement of masked objects via silhouettes. But if you want to take a closer look at a masked area, you can just unmask it by using area control.

So, there may be zones that shouldn’t be monitored at all. Those locations can be set as fixed privacy zones. Additionally, workers in fixed positions can be set as constantly masked zones. And it also works the other way around:  zones where cargo passes can be set as non-applicable zones.

It is obvious that this kind of solution becomes crucial in different fields. Logistics as well as Retail and Banking to name a few: Monitoring product distribution on production lines and in warehouses, monitoring shelf goods and money transactions or waiting rooms and counter documents.

What is needed to install it?
For those who plan to install cameras, Panasonic has a camera-based solution. The new camera provides protection of privacy with minimum initial costs for software or servers. It is able to deliver images with and without masking. This can be controlled according to authority level.

For those who have already installed cameras, Panasonic has a PC-based solution (available in June 2016). The new WV-ASM200 supports protection of privacy using existing cameras for effective use of assets. Even if only images without masking are captured, masked images can be generated on the server side. Masking and non-masking can be controlled during monitoring and played back according to the authority level.

Panasonic creates a solution that provides privacy measures while using existing analogue systems.

See the video to this product here.

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