Cutting-Edge

By: Nelendhre Moodley

Security products and solutions provider Hikvision continues to deliver innovative solutions for a broad range of vertical markets, including the mining sector, one of its key markets. SA Mining recently chatted to Rudi Swanepoel: project sales manager of Hikvision South Africa about its product range, which is touted to increase efficiency and greater commercial success.

How important is innovation and technology to Hikvision?

Hikvision is a global leader in technology development. We have dedicated divisions allocated to just that. Their core function is to ensure we stay on top of what is trending as well as the development of trendsetting technologies to introduce to the market. Hikvision understands the importance of technology development and by working closely with the mining sector we are dedicated to finding and developing solutions to our clients’ challenges.

How is Hikvision’s strategy aligned with industry health and safety trends?

Safety and the development of technologies to manage it with various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and platforms is very important to our business. We have developed technologies that focus on safety and how it is managed in the workplace. Our strategy is focused on providing solutions that seamlessly integrate with our clients’ health and safety management systems as well as providing the data and information needed to better manage what is happening in the workplace. Data is key here – without knowing what happened in the environment one will never be able to better the outcome.

How does the company go about identifying the needs of industry in terms of the type of products that need to be developed?

Hikvision has built long-standing relationships with the mining sector over the years and we encourage our clients to share their needs and requirements in order for us to provide technologies and solutions. Not only do we develop products based on our clients’ needs – by taking the time to go and understand their environment and feeling the situation on the ground we are able to propose solutions to what we identify as possible high-risk situations. By applying our expertise in developing technologies and solutions as a market leader in surveillance and AI development, not only do we allow our clients to focus on their operations but we provide them with the tools to better understand what is happening on the ground.

What are some of your latest technical developments and how have they been received by the mining industry?

Hikvision Temperature Screening Solution

Keeping people safe and healthy in unsure times is a very modern challenge. Authorities and companies alike are scrambling to find ways to help manage this and reduce risks. Hikvision offers temperature screening solutions to help them build processes and infrastructures to prevail. Hikvision Temperature Screening Solution, with multiple product types and a wide range of applications, is designed for the detection of skin-surface temperatures so as to achieve rapid and safe preliminary screening in public areas with high efficiency in a multitude of scenarios.

It offers non-contact measurement to avoid physical contact, one second per person for skin-surface temperature detection, AI detection, which greatly reduces false alarms and group detection for maximum 30 people at a time.

Hikvision’s Explosion-Proof Solutions

In dark underground mining areas where flammable gases or combustible particles are present, every layer of protection is crucial. With market-proven explosion-proof and anti-corrosive performance, Hikvision’s Explosion-Proof Thermal Network Cameras nullify dangers from sparks and combustible materials, protecting mining personnel with enhanced thermal imaging and temperature exception alarms, thus keeping everyone safe in combustible, low-light environments, with first-rate surveillance.

Hikvision Perimeter Protection

Perimeter protection plays a crucial role in any physical security system protecting critical infrastructure, high-risk sites.

Over the past decade, advances in technology and hardware have vastly improved these perimeter security systems with developments in thermal network cameras, radar detection systems, alarm sensors, and now even drones that accomplish unprecedented security tasks. More recently, the development of advanced algorithms has helped to reduce false alarms that many of these devices trigger automatically. But consistent, reliable verification between true and false alarms was still lacking. Used widely in the mining sector and by combining it with our control room technologies our clients have seen great success in ensuring their perimeters are not breached. Securing the perimeter is key in protecting one’s staff and assets.

ANPR Solutions

Being able to identify vehicles entering the workplace is an important safety and security benefit for businesses. In the past, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) has been costly, unreliable and only relevant for a limited number of applications. Errors were commonplace and the available hardware could not read every licence plate reliably, and so could not operate without human confirmation. Additionally, low-light areas, oblique vantage points, and non-standard characters caused issues in detecting and capturing number plates. Today’s ANPR cameras, engineered with deep learning algorithms and GPU processors, are extremely accurate. Fully integrated with our access control technologies, this solution is very effective in ensuring only registered vehicles are permitted entry.

People-Counting Technologies

Calculating the numbers of people/staff who enter your operations can help a company improve its operations in a number of ways. It becomes possible to know exactly how many people are on-site at any given time and integrated into access control this becomes a very effective tool in determining how many staff members and people are present vs the number that have departed. With this information on hand, our clients have accurate accounts of the number of people who have entered their operations, and for instance, how many have left or are unaccounted for in case of an emergency.

Control Room Solutions

Hikvision has accumulated a strong technical advantage in platform software with a professional engineering team that has contributed to the breakthrough of many of today’s cutting-edge technologies. Our cloud platform features global distributed multi-site deployment, highly reliable and fail-safe architecture, along with technologies like multi-level cache, dynamic domain name resolution, P2P network penetration, and adaptive network technologies. Our technologies offer sophisticated management platforms with data-rich reporting functions available on multiple platforms, like for instance control room environments, as well as mobile applications to stay on top of what is going on from anywhere in the world. Our solutions have assisted our clients in streamlining their control room environments and provided the ability to view and proactively manage all of their functions from a single platform. Much more can now be managed with much less manpower and input.

Automatic Safety Helmet-Wearing Detection

We have developed solutions specific to the detection of PPE, providing our clients with real-time data and statistics of how many people are wearing the prescribed PPE in the designated areas as well as how many are not where it is required. The technology offers our clients the means to have an accurate report on the status as well as provide them with notifications of people not wearing the prescribed PPE with the identification of such people as registered on the system, a proactive solution giving our clients control and ensuring compliance.

How important is the mining sector to Hikvision?

The mining sector is one of our key focus areas and we are constantly working to better our relationship with it. We have a team of staff members focused on the mining sector. The mining sector has some of the harshest and toughest environments in the industry and we have developed solutions for that environment. Developing solutions alone is not enough – relationship and trust is key in this sector and we are dedicated to achieving it by giving our clients our time and applying tailor-made working solutions based on their environment.

Any other information you wish to impart?

The mining sector, specifically in South Africa, is a very tough environment. Our clients face constant challenges in this environment and this applies to safety and compliance as well as security- and crime-related challenges. By working closely with this sector, Hikvision strives to provide solutions that will offer our clients the data required to manage their operations by applying their focus on areas where it is needed the most.