Incubated from IIT-Delhi in 2005, Vehant Technologies a leading Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning focused company that develops state-of-the-art Security Screening Solutions, Smart & Safe City Solutions, and Enterprise Analytics Solutions.
The company’s motivation was to develop indigenous products and solutions out of India in the areas of computer vision and image processing, especially in security & surveillance.
It started designing under vehicle scanning system, which was till then imported in the country. It was a strategic necessity for the country to have these security products, made in India.
Over the last many years Vehant Technologies has supplied and installed around 800 units in India and 12 other countries. The company added an AI-based automated number plate reading system which morphed into Trafficmon: Traffic enforcement and Management system, which have now been deployed in almost 30 smart cities across India.
In 2015 it added X-Ray baggage scanners to its portfolio and have grabbed a 25% market share in the last two years and have successfully sold to airports and many government sectors too.
In an interview with Manufacturing Today, Kapil Bardeja, CEO & Co Founder at Vehant Technologies talks about the solutions it offers and the growth opportunities in India.
Here are the excerpts:
What are Vehant’s prior engagements with the manufacturing industry?
Vehant has expertise in delivering deep learning based physical security surveillance and traffic monitoring & junction enforcement solutions. It helps various manufacturing segments by incident detection, alert generation, data visualization etc. We have worked closely with many manufacturing giants and have provided them with our solution like X-Ray Baggage scanner, UVSS for premise security along with the AI based video analytics system for the better safety and supervision of the workers to avoid any hazard.
How can your solutions help the manufacturing industry?
Our solutions helps various manufacturing industries to dig out patterns hidden in the manufacturing process and identify root causes, and apply solutions to data-driven actions.
We help manufacturers by providing insights that can be used to understand behaviour, incidents, etc. helping improve SoP compliance and overall operations by video analytics. We incorporate analytic solutions for tackling challenges faced by the manufacturing units for fulfilling security compliance. We provide Loitering Detection, Violence Detection, Violence & Fight Detection, Fire and smoke detection, Distance Detection etc.
Can you also please provide some use cases?
We can implement the use cases in the manufacturing units for adherence to Safety Compliance, SoP and to keep surveillance on the crucial areas.
– PPE Analytics like Safety Helmet, Harness, safety Jacket, and Safety Shoes detection-
– Person Fighting/Violence
– Line Cross/Intrusion Detection
– Smoke & Fire Detection
– Crowd Detection
– Animal Intrusion
– Loitering detection
Which all products have you developed which cater to the manufacturing industry?
We have come up with our tailored safety solutions like Video Analytics Platform, which helps in detecting various events like person intrusion, smoke and fire, loitering etc. Our Security screening solutions can be installed at the various manufacturing facilities where highly sensitive or patented products are being manufactured. These systems supervise that no manufactured part can be taken out of the manufacturing site.
Our traffic management and enforcement system like speed detection, No Helmet, no parking zone etc. are proving to be very beneficial for manufacturing premises where there is a constant movement of vehicles and workers.
Challenges you faced while developing these products?
The challenges that we have come across are more or less similar to what most of the entrepreneurs face while starting a venue. There was a huge challenge of recruiting the key R&D talent in the initial days. Back in those days UVSS’ was a product that was focused on the security of the high-profile establishments to which there wasn’t a practically established demand for India, so “Establishing a market for the same was a painstaking process, but it allowed the company to become a market leader in that space,”
How is the technology different from your competitors?
There are a wide variety of techniques ranging from the simplistic to the latest bleeding-edge deep neural networks that can be thrown at any given problem. In my experience, one key aspect we always try to adhere to has been to choose techniques that lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: they give us a good mix of accuracy, performance, and superlative value. We have seen this applicable in other areas as well including choice of imaging or computing hardware, UI/UX, etc. Another key advantage of this approach is that these are bound to be more robust than the most sophisticated ones or the latest kid on the block approach. Plus, it’s easier to find talent who’s worked with these techniques or solutions.
Ultimately, this approach provides more value to the customer and gives them more bang for the buck.
What is your understanding about health & safety related requirements of the manufacturing industry?
Workplace safety is one of the key concerns of every manufacturing company and facility. Getting it right can help the whole operation’s performance and results grow, while safety issues may cost time, money, injuries, and even reputational damages. So it has to be taken really good care of. It is important to fulfil health and safety requirements in manufacturing premises. Our product and solutions helps to incorporate and maintain safety into the work place and it adheres to Industry Compliance and Worker Safety. With our Artificial Intelligence based and machine learning based solutions like PPE Analytics, it can be easily detected and an alarm could be generated person is not wearing safety helmets/safety harness or safety shoes etc. It could also detect person fighting, Line intrusion etc. which attributes to a higher safety management inside a manufacturing premise.
Do you also have plans to take your products/ solutions global?
We intend to continue our position as a market leader in our UVSS range of products, grow our market share to around 30% in the X-Ray business, also adding new X-ray scanning use cases for people and vehicles. We also intend to expand to South East Asia for smart city business, add new use cases on smart city and private AI-based analytics space, and retain a 60% market share in the smart city portfolio. In long term, we intend to be an 800-1000 crore, Indian MNC with a diversified portfolio of India-made products in the Security, surveillance, and Traffic management space across the world.