Visual gun detection and audio gunshot detection technologies play crucial roles in enhancing the safety and security of various environments, including government buildings, schools, social gathering areas, campuses, and workplaces. These technologies offer proactive and reactive measures to detect and respond to potential threats, contributing significantly to overall safety and peace of mind.
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Visual Gun Detection: Visual gun detection uses advanced video analytics and artificial intelligence to identify firearms in real-time through surveillance cameras. This technology can detect and alert security personnel to the presence of a firearm before any shots are fired, allowing for a swift response to prevent potential violence. In sensitive environments such as schools and government buildings, early detection is paramount to averting tragedies and ensuring the safety of occupants.
Importance:
Importance:
Differences Between Visual and Audio Detection:
Both technologies complement each other, providing a comprehensive safety and security solution. Visual gun detection offers the advantage of early warning, while audio gunshot detection ensures that any nearby gunfire is immediately recognized and responded to. The layered solution of visual gun detection and audio gunshot detection creates a safer environment by combining advanced technology with strategic security measures. Here's an explanation of how these systems work together to enhance safety.
Check out the excerpt from the presentation recording featuring Matt Cirnigliaro and Nils Zerrer from Bosch Security and Safety Systems where they discuss some of the latest advancements in audio and visual gun detection, focusing on what this means for users of these systems and how they can enhance safety and security in various environments.
Download Nils and Matt's Presentation here >>
Check out the excerpt from the presentation recording featuring Dr. Florian Richter from Bosch Security and Safety Systems where he deep-dives into the latest advancements in visual gun detection, focusing on what this means for users of these systems and how they can enhance safety and security in various environments.
Download Florian's presentation here >>
The demonstration in the video above simulates entry points at various types of buildings such as K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and corporate campuses. The primary goal is to showcase how a multi-level audio-visual gun detection system from Bosch can effectively identify real guns and gunshot sounds while minimizing false positives from common objects like coffee cups, cell phones, doors slamming closed, balloons popping, and other similar situations.
Initial Detection:
Threat Identification:
Real-Time Response:
The integration of visual gun detection and audio gunshot detection technologies provides a robust solution for creating safer environments in schools, workplaces, and other settings. By addressing the challenges of false positives and ensuring rapid response capabilities, this system significantly enhances overall security and safety.
Technical Whitepaper: Audio AI
Bosch Gun Detection System Leaflet
Matt Golueke spoke with Bosch engineers Jacob Gallucci and Ajit Belsarkar following testing and evaluation of Bosch's audio gunshot detection system to understand at a more technical level what these engineers have been working on to perfect audio gunshot detection.
Check out the excerpt from the presentation recording featuring Matt Cirnigliaro and Nils Zerrer from Bosch Security and Safety Systems where they discuss some of the latest advancements in audio and video gun detection, focusing on what this means for users of these systems and how they can enhance safety and security in various environments.
Download Nils and Matt's Presentation here >>
The original technology of Bosch's audio gunshot detection came from the SoundSee audio AI technology. There are three main portions of this technology:
The advantage is that you don't have to send any data to the cloud. Everything is done on the processor itself, within the camera. The speed from an event occurring to when you're getting an alarm is much faster. The audio is being sampled four times every second. So, from the time a gunshot occurs to the time the camera detects the gunshot and starts sending out alerts to your VMS is very fast, between 250 to 500 milliseconds. Whereas if you're using a computer in the cloud or in your server rack, running a big AI model, you're at the mercy of the latency of your network and computers to get your detection. And then from there, even more latency to get it out to whoever needs to see and confirm this detection.
The processor, which is a high end processor on this Bosch FLEXIDOME panoramic 5100i (IR) camera allows you to run AI models at very high speeds. They are tens of milliseconds, as opposed to if a competitive system is sending data to a cloud for processing.
The Bosch solution starts with the MEMS sensor in the housing, which is then connected to a audio codec, which converts the analog signal into the digital component for the system.
The system then is taking in that digital signal and it's being converted into what's called a spectrogram. It's a picture of sound, for all intents and purposes.
That picture of sound is then given to the AI model. The AI model then predicts whether this is a gunshot or not. That AI model has been trained with at least 10,000 gunshots from 20 plus different firearms, at multiple distances, along with at least 200,000 examples of false positive information.
If you take the spectrogram of each gun and you observe it, you will see that they are different. And then you can also see the spectrograms of other audio events, say, for example, if you're playing sound of a gunshot through a speaker.
Bosch started playing audio recordings of gunshots through a speaker and that was helpful in the very beginning stages, but eventually the audio AI got so good that it just wasn't working when using a speaker anymore. As Bosch engineers started going to gun ranges and testing with different types of guns, and started incorporating that data into their system, you could already see that the speaker-based gunshot sound was no longer working, which is what was desired. The speaker can't produce the sharp impulse sound that a gunshot can, or a car backfiring. It can't produce a dense signal of all the frequencies because of how the speaker moves, or oscillates. When you look at the spectrogram, there are "gaps" in the sound signature.
Installer Settings
Environments are unique. You have retail, you have traffic, you have theaters, indoors and outdoors. Bosch has taken thousands of gunshots and augmented that data on top of common environmental sounds. There are hours and hours of recording of traffic and crowds. Hours of hours of recording fireworks. That amount of data is one of the strengths of the Bosch system.
Testing
It is very difficult to test a gunshot system. You cannot be certain 100 percent unless you shoot a gun and see the system react in your unique environment. However, Bosch has done is a couple of things to help:
It's very difficult to do a live gunfire test, so you can at least use these methods to build your confidence that that system is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
Bosch incorporated testing blanks as well, however, the main focus has been the actual gunshot sounds. So, the fact remains, if you want to truly test any audio gunshot detection system you need to make arrangements and have a live fire exercise to ensure proper functionality. Any other way you test it that isn't a live gunshot, is a false positive detection. The system is meant to detect gunshots, and that's ideally the only thing it detects.
On the other hand, you can do false positive testing. You can pop a balloon, you can do car misfire, you can do all other kinds of audio events, like a firecracker or something similar, where you can see if your system would create a false positive alarm.
Audio Privacy
If you want to or are required to turn audio recording off, yet you want the gunshot detection to be running in the camera, this is possible. The audio used by the gunshot detection system is completely separate from the audio that can be used to capture voices for surveillance or similar operations. It's a dedicated audio stream just for gunshot detection and that that stream is never accessible from outside the camera, even if you have audio enabled.
The Bosch gunshot detection system does the signal processing and after that, that clip is thrown away. So there's no recording going into any storage.
How AI is enabling the audio and visual gun detection systems?
Check out this presentation from Dr. Florian Richter at the 2024 Security Technology Forum where Florian deep-dives into not only gun detection, but also calibration and object attributes. The gun detection-specific section starts at 24:50, but you should really watch the entire session to better understand the value of AI to these systems.
Download Florian's presentation here >>
Technical Whitepaper: Audio AI
Bosch Gun Detection System Leaflet
Series Options
We conducted a field evaluation of Bosch's innovative visual gun detection system, demonstrating its capabilities and effectiveness in outdoor and indoor scenarios. The video below captures our evaluation process and results.
Detection Cameras Configuration:
Panoramic Camera:
Long Gun Detection:
Handgun Detection:
False Positive Suppression:
Bosch’s Visual Gun Detection System stands out as a robust and effective solution for enhancing security across diverse settings. Its precise threat detection capabilities, combined with the ability to minimize false positives, make it an invaluable tool for safeguarding public spaces. The comprehensive field evaluation clearly demonstrates its potential to significantly improve security measures, ensuring a safer environment for all.
With too many instances of violence in our schools and public spaces, prevention is critical for educators and officials who must keep students, faculty, and staff safe. When students feel safe at school, they can focus on learning, resulting in improved academic performance.
In the video below from a recent Security Technology Forum, Nils Zerrer, Florian Richter, and Matt Cirnigliaro demonstrate and explain Bosch's new layered solution approach to safety featuring audio gunshot detection and visual gun detection.
Key chapters:
The Gun Detection System from Bosch is the first to pair video and audio AI to prioritize proactive security and safety involving guns at schools. The near-invisible system offers a multi-layered approach to elevate the security and safety of campuses while enabling a smooth, frictionless flow and welcoming atmosphere that promotes learning.
When someone brandishing a gun enters the school, the system is designed to promptly alert personnel who can verify the gun and take proactive measures. If a gun is not visually detected, audio AI, the second layer, is designed to detect and classify gunshots precisely while accurately estimating the direction from which the sound originates. This capability may enable quick and appropriate responses. And since the system’s visual and audio layers are camera-based, security staff can always rely on high-quality video footage for forensics supporting first responders.
Bosch's Gun Detection System can operate independently, but it is also compatible with other systems like Bosch's Audio Gunshot Detection System, video surveillance, access control, and public address. These integration paths enable additional responses like human verification, locking doors, initiating automated public address and two-way radio announcements, and dictating smart lockdown and evacuation protocols.
Install the system at entrances, high traffic funnel points, and approach paths up to 30-feet wide to provide early warning while remaining nearly transparent and frictionless as opposed to metal detection systems. This system consists of the following components:
Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) and grant writing support
Interested in upgrading your school security, but need funding? Bosch is partnering with a grant writing agency to help you understand federal funding eligibility, ESSER funding details, and grant opportunities.
Bosch Gun Detection System Leaflet
Technical Whitepaper: Audio AI
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