SENSORS | QUALITY ASSURANCE
I SPY WITH MY
An Israeli start-up has taken a system for
detecting explosives underneath vehicles
and re-designed it for the automotive
quality assurance market.
Tom Austin-Morgan reports.
Brothers Amir and Ohad
Hever founded UVeye in
August 2016 after Amir
had witnessed the manual
inspection of vehicles for security
threats. The traditional approach
is for a security guard to circle a
vehicle with a mirror on the end of a
long pole to try and spot weapons or
explosives. Besides the fact that this
test is outdated and unreliable, most
importantl, it is life-threatening.
UVeye, which stands for under
vehicle eye, originally developed
both a fixed and a mobile
inspection system, called Helios,
that automatically detects visual
anomalies on the undercarriage of
any vehicle. The fixed unit version
is most suitable for facilities with
permanent entrances where moving
of the system is not required.
The mobile version is designed
especially for law enforcement
agencies, security firms and
intelligence organisations that need
to scan passing vehicles easily and
conveniently.
In less than 5 seconds Helios’
inbuilt, hi-res, super-fast cameras
scan the vehicle’s underside
capturing sharp, clear colour images
from numerous angles and alerts
operators immediately if it detects
concealed items — be it threats,
concealed weapons, or a human
being.
The camera also enables the
system to match each vehicle
undercarriage footprint and store
the information in a secure database
for later inquiry.
This could be
highly valuable
information for
border control
where different
border locations
can share the
data scanned
by the system of a
specific vehicle.
From the very first
In less than
3 seconds, Helios’
inbuilt, hi-res, superfast
LPR camera scans
the vehicle’s underside
capturing sharp, clear
3D colour images
from numerous
angles
scan, it can automatically
recognise and identify dubious
objects without having any previous
record of a vehicle. It can even
compare between scans of the same
vehicle model and detect whether
any changes have been made.
David Oren, chief strategy officer
at UVeye, says: “The technology
we had to develop to do that was
very advanced. We built our own AI
engine, deep learning,
machine learning and
computer vision into that.
“Once we started deploying those
systems, very quickly we realised
that almost the same technology,
with just a small adjustment, could
be able to detect various problems
on vehicles in general, such as oil
leakages; rust; corrosion; damage to
the undercarriage.”
Early in 2017, UVeye started
working with automotive companies
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