Intelligent CISO Issue 10 | Page 49

C Colleen Glaeser is the Global Marketing Director for AxxonSoft, one of the largest tech security companies in the world. She is also the owner of South African luxury safari lodge, Karkloof Safari Villas and has seen first hand the carnage rhino and elephant poaching can have. She has innovatively combined both AxxonSoft and Karkloof to combat this physical security threat. “The technology utilises the latest surveillance and security solutions, which incorporates Deep Learning, which is a method under Artificial Intelligence (AI). This technology has been adapted to tell the difference between humans and animals. “Prior to the incorporation of Deep Learning in anti-poaching surveillance, software often failed control rooms and response units in that false alarms were, on many occasions, set off by animals, insects and weather. Control rooms were not able to tell the difference between an actual threat and a false alarm, which often resulted in exhausting resources as teams were dispatched for animals who had touched the fence while grazing in their natural habitat. “AxxonSoft’s Deep Learning solution now alerts the operators in the control room to an immediate poaching threat as poachers try and breach the fence perimeter to enter the reserve or park.” Taking around six months to rollout and implement, the technology has been widely received. “There are rangers on the ground, but they can’t be everywhere especially when you’re dealing with 2,000 acres,” said Glaeser. “And then you have another complication where the animals might bump the fence and set off an alarm that the electric fence is being disturbed. Colleen Glaeser, Global Marketing Director at AxxonSoft www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 10 “However now, if an alarm goes off, it will only pick up a human and not an animal. We’ve had extremely good success with some arrests being made. The rangers feel more equipped because they know where to go and it won’t be a FEATURE false alarm. You want to see what type of ammunition people are carrying and what type of arms. And that can only be done through surveillance. “The technology has really been grasped by farm and park owners and we’re currently in negotiations with some of the major parks to deploy this type of surveillance. In the past, they had nowhere to go and didn’t know what they were dealing with. Poachers come well-armed and with a lot of technology behind them, like drones they can access, whereas the park owners don’t have as much to combat it. So, this technology really helps. “It provides a proactive solution to surveillance whereas previous systems were somewhat archaic and reactive in their response to real threats. Our Deep Learning technology has been extremely successful thus far in telling the difference between animals and humans. “AxxonSoft has developed a process for adapting neural network filters to AxxonSoft’s Deep Learning solution now alerts the operators in the control room to an immediate poaching threat. the needs of a specific site. The neural network learns to perform customer- specific tasks from video material obtained at the site, which guarantees high-quality results. To resolve issues of high resource consumption related to AI, AxxonSoft uses a blended approach with a neural network filter applied to an object tracker — the filter can identify a specific type of moving objects or abandoned items.” 49