Ambient AI Inc. is emerging from stealth mode today with $52 million in funding and technology that it hopes will revolutionize physical security.

The company, whose founders worked in computer vision and robotics at Stanford University, Apple Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp., says it has developed an image recognition system that analyzes video feeds from existing security cameras to detect security threats contextually without violating privacy.

Ambient.ai says its technology can all but eliminate the false alerts that plague conventional surveillance-based security systems. It has developed around 100 “signatures” that depict potential threats – such as a car parked overnight outside an office building or a person forcing open a door — and applies smart image recognition to screen video feeds for their presence.

The system is intended to replace the largely manual approach commonly used today, which co-founder and Chief Executive Shikhar Shrestha said is too prone to error.

“We install hundreds of security cameras that nobody is watching,” he said. “Then we set up alarm systems like sensors on doors and windows that create thousands of alerts every day, 99% of which are false alarms. Then we have security officers doing a lot of observing and reporting and they can’t be everywhere at once.”

The current approach “is reactive by default,” he said. “Our best bet is to wait for the incident to happen and then pull the video to analyze after the fact.”

Understanding context

Computer vision has been used in physical security for years but the technology has numerous shortcomings, he said. Motion detection is “very noisy; you get an alert if leaves are moving in the background,” he said. Second-generation object recognition systems can identify people and things but lack context for observed behavior.

In contrast, Ambient.ai’s technology understands the context of the scene and can apply signatures to discover aberrations. “We can look for many things at once, which we call primitive events,” Shrestha said. “We can combine primitives to create signatures.” The company has set a goal to double the number of signatures it creates each year and steadily improve the quality of its subscription-based software.

Ambient.ai has assembled a blue-chip team of investors headlined by Andreessen Horowitz LLC. It already counts “half of the largest capitalized companies in the U.S. as customers,” with many spending more than $1 million a year, Shrestha said.

The company cited an unnamed customer who said the technology is already saving more than $3 million per year by cutting down on the 12,000 weekly alarms it used to receive, while another reported a 93% reduction in alarm volume.

Image: Ambient.ai