Solutions by typeIntrusion detection
How do I tell a normal job from one that isn’t?
A theft almost always looks like work
Almost one in the afternoon, in broad daylight. Two people inside the substation yard. One is crouched in front of a field cabinet swung wide open, pulling out copper conductors; the other is coiling them on the ground. They’re wearing gloves, they’re calm and they aren’t looking around. From a screen, this looks a great deal like a crew on a scheduled job. And today there is no scheduled job.
4 cameras across 4 sectors
This is how you ask for it
«Tell me if a cabinet is opened or material leaves the site when there is no authorized work at that hour.»
The copper is discovered when something fails or when somebody opens that cabinet, and that may be weeks away. By then the cost is no longer the metal: it’s the outage, the fault it causes and the crew that has to go out and repair what was taken for the price of scrap. Same with the rest: the missing drum shows up in the quarterly inventory count, and the boxes from the controlled cupboard in an audit. By then the video of that day was recorded over weeks ago.
You decide once
You decide this once, and the key is the calendar. You say which cabinets, racks or stores are sensitive, what hours have authorized work and who gets the alert when something’s opened outside those hours. IRIS checks all of them, every day, without anyone having to remember. The rule isn’t “I do not like the look of this person”: it is “at this hour, here, nothing was scheduled.” When a job is scheduled that window opens, and when the job finishes it closes on its own.
The picture everybody has of a theft — someone running off at night with a bag — is almost never the picture. What you actually see is someone calm, going through the motions of work: opening a cabinet, filling a shopping cart, taking boxes out of a cupboard, loading a van. It looks like work because it’s done exactly the way work is done. And in many places it is done in broad daylight, at one in the afternoon, when it draws less attention than it would at three in the morning.
That’s why nobody looking at a screen can tell the difference, and why IRIS never decides what anybody is doing there: it doesn’t know, and it isn’t its job. What can be known is something else, and it’s a checkable fact: at that hour, in that place, nothing was scheduled. That sentence turns an impossible judgment into a piece of information you look up in a calendar, and the person looking it up has the works plan in front of them.
So the rule leans on what the organization already knows: the works plan, the open orders, the store’s opening hours. A field cabinet swung wide open in a substation on a day with no crew. A slot in the product rack that is empty in the morning with no removal logged. Boxes leaving the controlled cupboard at ten at night with no order for that hour. A sealed package crossing the armored door of the cash back office. A technician five minutes too long in front of a rack in a server aisle. None of those is a theft on its own. All of them can be checked in a minute.
IRIS sees what happens, compares it with what was scheduled and, when it doesn’t match, says so with camera, hour and video. Most of the time it is a job that got done and nobody logged, and that call takes half a minute. But the day it isn’t, the alert arrives while the cabinet is still open — and not three weeks later, when the copper has been melted down and nothing’s left of the video from that lunchtime.
What changes
Before, this was known when the stock was counted or when something stopped working, and the video was little use because nobody knew which day to look at. Now the alert arrives while the cabinet is still open, with the camera attached. And who decides changes too: it’s no longer a guard trying to guess whether that’s a crew, it’s the maintenance manager looking at his works plan and answering in a minute. Whoever has the context is the one who gets the alert.
Where we have seen it
CAM-518A package leaves through the vault door, and now the time is on record
«Tell me when an object goes out through the vault doorway, and give me the exact time and how many people are in the room.»
CAM-533Chips changing hands ten feet from the cash window
«Mark the moments when chips pass from one hand to another away from the tables, near the window, and keep them with the time.»
CAM-297Boxes leave the controlled cabinet with no work order open
«Tell me if boxes are taken out of the controlled cabinet when no work order is open for that hour.»
CAM-343A cabinet is being emptied of its copper
«Tell me if a cabinet is opened or cable is taken out of the yard when no authorized work is under way.»
What it doesn’t do
IRIS does not see what is inside a box and does not know what it is worth. It sees a package going out through a door and a slot in the rack that has been left empty. How much is missing is told by the inventory count, not by the camera.
And it accuses nobody. It does not recognize faces, it never decides what anybody is doing there, and on its own it cannot tell authorized work from unauthorized: that is told apart by the calendar you gave it and by the person who calls to check.
Questions
- Does IRIS point at somebody as a thief?
- No, never. IRIS does not recognize faces, does not know who anyone is and does not label any person. What it says is a fact: at 12:53 p.m. this cabinet was opened, on this camera, and there was no work scheduled here at this hour. With that, a person decides whether to call maintenance or to call security. The difference matters: a system that hands out labels gets it wrong about people who have done nothing, and a system that gives facts with an hour and a video can be checked.
- What if the job was legitimate and nobody logged it?
- It happens often, and it isn’t a fault: it’s the system doing what it should. The alert arrives, somebody checks the plan, it isn’t there, they call on the radio and in thirty seconds it is cleared up. Over time something good happens: because every unlogged job generates a call, jobs start getting logged. The calendar improves by itself. And if in one particular place that is unavoidable, you change the rule instead of putting up with alerts nobody’s going to read.
- Can it detect that something’s missing, not just somebody taking it?
- Yes, and it’s a different case, solved by looking at the empty slot. You show IRIS the product rack or the shelving and every morning it checks whether each slot is occupied. If a drum isn’t there, it comes out in the report with the hour it stopped being there and the camera where it was last seen. That works even when no camera caught the moment it was taken out, because what’s being looked at isn’t the person: it’s the empty space.
- Is the video usable as evidence?
- The video is the same one as always and is worth whatever it is worth in each country; IRIS doesn’t change that. What it adds is that the video exists and can be found: the alert marks the exact minute, keeps the clip before the recording is written over, and leaves it findable by what happened, not by the hour somebody thinks they remember. Many complaints collapse because the video existed and no longer does. That problem does get solved.
A different case every time
Watch what happens. Then watch what IRIS does with it.
Not a recorded video and not a drawing: it’s a summary of the real tool, with a different case each time round. The whole tool doesn’t fit in a box.
- You ask
- IRIS searches
- It shows you
Not seeing yours here?
These words are the ones we have built, not the ones IRIS understands. The list falls short on purpose: you ask for it in a sentence, and sentences don’t run out. Tell us what is in front of your cameras and we’ll tell you whether it understands it, or not yet.
And the best part
A recollection can’t be checked.A number can, and it comes out the same every day.
The number doesn’t depend on who was on shift or how they remember it. It’s measured the same way every day, and that’s why people counting is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología. That approval is Spanish and it isn’t equivalent to any U.S. certification: we say so up front and not at the end.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.