The man of the hour, an innovator, and an ace leader, Abhijit Shanbhag is the CEO and Founder of Graymatics.
Founded in 2016, Graymatics is a Singapore-based cognitive media processing start-up with offices in India and California, USA. Well-known for its transformational technologies and their relevance to today’s urban and business safety landscape, it primarily offers CCTV-based video analytics solutions to enable clients to draw critical insights from existing infrastructure all in detailed dashboards.
Laying the Foundation
During Abhijit’s time in the US, he observed that although a lot of image and video content was being generated all around, there was an almost negligible presence of video search and analytics tools. The rise of CCTVs in the urban and commercial landscape was leading to humongous video content generation which he decided to convert into machine-understandable data and offer a wide range of highly-useful solutions.
Graymatics was launched to address this segment and today, the company’s solutions are integrated with deep learning tools to enhance security and surveillance systems in various industry sites as well as smart cities in countries like India.
About Graymatics
Graymatics currently offers video analytics solutions to various smart cities globally and also to various smart spaces such as large organizational campuses (IT companies), commercial buildings, factories, highways, ports, airports, smart banks, retail businesses, and corporate clients such as Siemens, Hindustan Oil and Gas, and telecom carriers in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, China, The Philippines, Japan, and Korea to boost the safety, security, customer experience and operational efficiency for its clients. The company already has a footprint in other APAC countries, America, Europe, and the Middle East and plan to grow in those market.
Giving wings to Graymatics
Abhijit always had conviction in the power of AI analytics. During his time in California, he observed that although a lot of video content was being generated globally, there was a lack of good video search and analytics tools. With CCTV networks in the urban and commercial landscapes generating humongous video content, he wanted to bring a solution that could convert video content into machine-understandable data. This was how Graymatics was founded in 2016 as a multinational cognitive multimedia processing start-up.
Graymatics offers path-breaking technologies which are highly relevant to the modern urban and commercial safety landscape. Its primary solution is an advanced CCTV-based video analytics system that can be seamlessly deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises as per the client’s needs. With Graymatics’s platform, clients can gather critical insights from their existing infrastructure through detailed dashboards.
Graymatics was initially funded by Citrix Systems and the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office. Recently, the smart city enabler Quantela made a strategic investment in the company with significant Go-to-Market (GTM) alignment to help expand its capabilities in video analytics into AI smart solutions for its target markets.
In the post-pandemic scenario, Graymatics has introduced some highly effective and customized solutions to ensure COVID-19 protocols such as masking, and also to ensure traffic management through monitoring, number plate recognition, vehicle detection, etc.
Its hi-tech cloud platform can be customized to manage an office complex, a manufacturing park, a shopping mall, a residential complex, a transport network, hospitals, and even an entire smart city holistically.
An All-Inclusive Culture
Graymatics provides complete flexibility to the team and it has a multicultural team working in synergy from different parts of the globe.
Its implements the following measures to help employees and the company blend in the best possible way.
- We engaged with each member every quarter to understand any concerns or any improvement needed in the company’s working culture
- Offer education support for employees who would like to enhance their knowledge in our domain
- KPIs
- Understand employee behaviours
- Relationship Building Activities
Accelerating through the Speed-breakers
As Graymatics is one of the first companies in its field to offer such in-depth image, audio, and video analysis for identification, there is pressure on the company to present a unique set of products to clients who might be used to more traditional technology.
A significant challenge in changing a client’s perspective exists through encouraging them to adapt to new technology. Over time, the team has successfully witnessed many major companies change tactics and take on this new technology.
An Overview of the Emerging Trends
As of now, we have only started venturing into the almost limitless applications of video AI. Machine learning and AI tools are becoming more advanced by the day, and in the upcoming times, there will be greater usage of these technologies in tandem with video cameras. This will enable predictive analytics and forecasting of future market trends, and consumer purchase patterns. The accuracy and scope of the abilities will continue to increase as further refinement of AI tech takes place.
With remote operations and digital processes, IoT and cybersecurity tools are also finding increasing integration with video analytics technologies. A key development that is also going to become a popular trend is the integration of cloud-based edge computing with video AI solutions. This will enable analytics of live footage and the generation of actionable insights in real-time. The smart system can store only specific information or suspicious footage instead of the usual several TBs of video data that is otherwise generated by multi-camera surveillance networks. Further, AI doesn’t get tired, bored, or distracted even when tasked with monitoring the same camera footage 24/7. Directed by the right inputs, it can identify different actions, objects, or suspicious behavior without any ‘blink and miss’ human error risks.
A major trend that will manifest in the year ahead will be the usage of video analytics as smartphone apps. Mobile cameras are already becoming quite capable of taking high-res pictures and videos. When integrated with video analytics, especially in the health and fitness arena, the technology is already helping people become better at their workout routines and postures courtesy of motion capture and analytics abilities.
Further, top-of-the-line video analytics technology has relevance in several use cases. For instance, let’s take a look at some of the possibilities in urban management. The integration of image sensors, night vision, and other capabilities can make a video AI solution apt for traffic management, speed tracking of vehicles, or intrusion alert at building perimeters or even at the borders of the country. The system would be able to spot unclaimed objects at an airport or a train station, and also detect dangerous driving or other traffic violations.
The technology’s most talked about use is probably in the area of surveillance and monitoring of people. Video AI analytics can detect unusual behavior such as loitering or a person falling. It can also identify criminals through the facial recognition tool if integrated with the database of such people as managed by law-and-order agencies and police.
Currently, we have seen only the tip of the iceberg as far as video AI deployment is concerned. In the arena of sports, video and AI analytics already form a part of a coach or sports analyst’s arsenal. Analyzing whether a player is doing the right things, following the right technique, or post-match analysis of a team’s performance, video analytics makes it all possible.
Retail businesses are among the early adopters of the technology as it helps them make their stores more secure by identifying suspicious activities. It also gives them ample data on consumer behavior, the performance of the stock on different shelves, and even the ability to assess the impact of in-store advertising. The impact of in-store advertising by video analytics might be complex or it can be reflected as the highest footfalls after in-store advertising can be measured.
Remote monitoring of contagion patients or perimeter surveillance as well as understanding patient behavior are some of the services that video analytics is going to be entrusted with. The technology will also be used in telemedicine processes where doctors can monitor and advise patients remotely. At times when the infection rate is high, it can ensure safety for all.
These are only a few of the scenarios in that video analytics that is going to be deployed. Trends indicate that such advanced and constantly improving technologies will increasingly enhance accuracy, reduce human error or oversight and also act as force multipliers in various domains in 2022 and beyond.
The Wall of Achievements
Graymatics has marked its presence in the market due to its performance, out-of-the-box solution offerings, and advanced technology.
- It’s the first company to be selected by Singapore’s PMO for its new Global Executive Entrepreneurship Award (attached is the Business Times article).
- It has recently got nominated as one of the 30 fastest-growing companies in Asia in 2019. The PR article will be released at the end of August.
- Reuters article as one of the top companies detecting violence (and such behaviour) within videos.
Adhering to the Mission and Vision
Graymatics’ mission is to make innovative technology accessible and usable to every industry. To serve Graymatics mission is to disrupt the market due to its wide level of offerings and the fact it offers more to the security industry than just image analysis. Current market disruptions in security are based mostly on extensive image analytics, a function that lacks real-time and video analytics.
At the moment, it is much more difficult for technology to analyse and detect specific details within a video, whereas this is quite straightforward with images. Graymatics offers not only in-depth video and image analytics but also performs audio analytics which enables security services to detect voice direction, emotion, and suspicious noise. This service can check for unwanted activity and video analytics can alert necessary authorities immediately.
Staying a Notch-Up than Others
As a cognitive media processing company, Graymatics offers a cloud platform that enables automatic analysis and recognition of products within videos and still images. The company’s core products are customized AI solutions for various verticals such as digital marketing, security, and surveillance, e-commerce, Manufacturing, telecommunications, Internet-of-Things, the financial sector, crowd management, smart cities, Healthcare, Construction etc.
There is a humongous presence of CCTV cameras and surveillance systems globally, but the majority of them don’t have any capabilities of actively monitoring and analysing the live feed, and such passive usage of the CCTV systems hugely undermines their capabilities.
This is where Graymatics has built a highly scalable, versatile, and cognitive platform which can analyse such huge video content volumes in almost real-time and turn the content into machine analysis data for future usage. Whether it is monitoring traffic and public behaviour or surveillance of commercial premises, checking intrusions on fences, or managing crowd density, Graymatics’ solution can be seamlessly customized to fulfil almost any need.
It also offers several competitive advantages over other products available in the market which make its platform the best-in-class. It offers the highest breadth of AI-powered video analytics in the industry along with optimized middleware to support the maximum number of high-performance AI analytics processes within a much smaller computer hardware footprint.
That makes Graymatics the brand with the lowest TCO for high-performance AI systems. Further, there is versatility of deployment options including edge, on-premises, cloud, or hybrid edge-to-cloud. Its other USPs include components such as a sophisticated alert report engine, forensic search, and insightful dashboards. The Graymatics platform can also be seamlessly integrated with a mobile app.
The Next Destination
Graymatics offers several competitive advantages over other products available in the market which make its platform the best-in-class and unique.
The company plans to grow in many regions in the next few years and grow its presence in Europe, the Middle East, and Brazil in South America. It is also building up Audio analytics which will be deployed as an embedded model with video analytics.
Abhijit’s Voice
My work in Graymatics is focused on pushing video analytics to be the most powerful and instrumental tool for any business in the globe. We want to challenge ourselves to be able to bring forth solutions to assist with the hardest questions.