How Smart Lighting with a 4K Camera helps Smart City Surveillance

For decades, a street light was simply a source of lighting for our dark streets and nothing else. But now digital disruption demands more than just the set of poles illuminating urban spaces. Emerging trend due to the smart city revolution has transformed street lights into smart lights. Smart lighting networks can be applied to any public or private places like homes, office spaces, streets or decorative settings.

What is Smart Lighting

Smart lighting is a multi-function lighting system controlled by a smartphone app. The android or Apple smartphones will have dedicated apps to interact with these lights. The apps can receive your voice, decipher the authenticity and act. Whether you are watching TV, having dinner, or reading books, smart lights can illuminate your room with the suitable intensity. Now lights have a multitude of purposes. They can perform diverse tasks like intelligent power management and effective home surveillance.

While smart lighting can help your homes feel more homely, its utilities can also be extended to metro surveillance, monitoring moving crowds and identifying anomalies using high-resolution cameras.

Smart lighting makes use of a mesh networking, in which each smart node is seamlessly connected to its nearest neighbor. A hub that plugs into the router controls the network and enables other devices over the network. Not all systems need to have a hub, for few platforms can directly connect to the Wifi. Smart lights combined with a 4K camera not only sheds light but can also gather data in form of images, sounds, and light intensity. They can help us curb crimes, check air quality and even tell when the garbage cans are full. Also, facial and object recognition for smart city analytics can help public transportation, resource management, police surveillance, real-estate data on neighborhoods.

4K Cameras with Smart Lighting helps the Surveillance

Security is a crucial challenge in both public and private places. While the technology involved in curbing crimes is not scarce, the primary challenge arises with the cost of implementation. Edge computing minimizes the operative cost and human involvement, making surveillance through smart lighting a viable option. With a 4K camera attached to an interoperable smart lighting system, we can draw many security benefits which can help us in making cities truly smart.

1. Climate-based Intensity

Transport in city areas gets affected by hostile climatic conditions. Often, city authorities cannot access the real-time status of snowfall or heavy rains. Streetlights in those cases need to be turned on as soon as possible so that it can curtail the risks of untoward incidents. Smart lights can access the real-time climatic data through their high-quality image processors and adjust the light intensity. When there is poor visibility, they can switch to higher intensity levels. Huawei’s Connected City Lighting Solution is one such example where the lights integrated over a mesh network are varied in their intensities as per the climatic changes.

2. Intelligent Brightness

Some places next to forests such as university campuses or city outskirts have a possibility of wild animals crossing their virtual fences in search of food. A high-quality 4K camera can analyze the movement and detect the animals from long distances and repel them by increasing the light intensity Since the crowd movement will be scant, these involuntary intrusions by animals mostly happen during night times. Hence a low light camera ISPs with digital image enhancement algorithms can help identify the objects during the night. Since we cannot use audio notification during the night, a brisk increase in light intensity can repel animals without affecting the general public.

3. Curbing Crimes in Public Spaces

People involving in criminal activities thrive on dark or dimly lit places. In places with meager human movements, there is no need for always-on lights. In those cases, smart lights can reduce energy consumption by monitoring the anomalies with their low-light cameras. The low light human motion detection camera can detect irregularities and turn on the lights in specific areas. With this energy consumption can be reduced by 60-70%. Also, by altering the light intensity based on the trail of irregular movements we can reduce the impact of the crimes. If an intruder starts to move, the lights in the traversed path can be highlighted to help the authorities to take a surgical action.

4. Home Safety

Smart lights are indispensable elements of a smart home. While they help in reducing the energy consumption, they also can play the large role in increasing the security offering. Smart lights can have an inbuilt 4K camera with high-quality video recording. The video can be simultaneously streamed live(on a smartphone app) and seamlessly recorded for several hours. If someone nears the main door, the owner is alerted on their mobile app with the live video stream. If a burglar starts to operate, the owner can turn on the inbuilt siren to repel him. If a delivery person is standing at the door, the inbuilt camera enables the owner to have an interaction via a two-way intercom. If the delivered parcel is kept in front of the door at owner’s discretion, the camera can be set to alert if any movement happens on the premises. This makes the delivery error free and secure.