
Launch HN: Visual One (YC W20) – Event recognition for security cameras - mrafiee
Hi HN. My name is Mohammad Rafiee and I am the founder&#x2F;CEO of Visual One (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualone.tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualone.tech</a>) We are building software for security cameras enabling them to  recognize specific events.<p>People use security cameras (aka IP cams) for various purposes—to monitor their properties, their kids, their pets, for elderly care, as doorbells, etc. But a shortcoming these cameras have is they rely mainly on motion detection to alert users and that leads to too many false alarms.<p>What led me to work on this problem initially was my personal experience with the IP cameras which I used to watch my dog and also as a doorbell at my house which I rented out on Airbnb sometimes. After trying some of these cameras (Ring, Nest and Wyze), I realized motion alerts are pretty much useless and person detection that some like Nest offer is not broadly useful. For example, for my dog, I only cared to know if&#x2F;when the dog walker picked her up or if she was doing something bad, like getting into my clothes, chewing my shoes&#x2F;TV remote, getting on the bed, etc. The motion alerts were completely useless as she is moving all the time obviously--person detection was also not useful for any of these events.
For my Airbnb rental use case (doorbell&#x2F;outdoor cams), the main things I cared to know about were if the guests parked their cars in the wrong location which pissed off my neighbors, or if the garage door was left open, or if there were a lot more people staying at the house than allowed. Again, motion alerts or person detection were not useful at all.<p>Having a background in machine learning &amp; computer vision, I felt this is a problem that is just starting to become solvable thanks to the powerful deep learning techniques developed in the the last 3-4 years.<p>Over the last 6 months, we have been building a cloud-based solution addressing this shortcoming for any IP camera without any dependency on the hardware. Our software allows users to create custom alerts for things that matter to them, like their dog chewing on shoes, their kid playing with the stove or their packages being stolen by porch pirates. It also allows them to search for past events after the fact instantly.<p>Currently, we support four categories of events:
- A specific object appeared &#x2F; disappeared, e.g. dog appeared, bicycle disappeared, package disappeared (coming soon.)
- A specific object in a specific location, e.g. a car parked in front of the driveway, elderly person taking medications, dog in the (neighbor’s) lawn, person getting into the garage.
- Two objects interacting, e.g. dog getting on the couch, kid playing with the stove, dog chewing on a shoe.
- Facial recognition based events, e.g. new person detected, a specific person appeared, max occupancy violated.<p>Users can create a new event in any of the above categories by providing a few simple inputs, e.g. pick the objects involved and the interaction between them, or specify a zone. Once the event is created, our software can immediately recognize that event with good accuracy. The users can also give a thumbs up&#x2F;down when they get an alert and their feedback is incorporated back into the models to improve their accuracy over time. Users can adjust the sensitivity for each event (precision and recall trade-off) based on their use case.<p>In addition to the smart alerts described above, we also index the footage in real time to allow users to query for past events after the fact and get the results instantly instead of having to go through all the past footage to find something they care about. For example: users can query the clips of when a laptop disappeared or a truck appeared.<p>Our solution can also alleviate privacy concerns since we only store short video clips on the cloud for alerts corresponding to user’s events of interest instead of for every motion detected.<p>We currently support Nest Cams and also offer our own cameras (same as the cameras sold by Wyze) with indoor and outdoor options.<p>I would love to hear any feedback&#x2F;thoughts you have. We are exploring different niche use cases to focus on initially and would appreciate any thoughts you may have based on your personal experience or any insights you may have.
Feel free to comment here or shoot me an email at rafiee@visualone.tech
======
mattlondon
Please consider making this work without the cloud (but still accessible from
the cloud if wanted of course).

You say you are selling camera hardware, so could selling a RPi or Google
Coral board with pre-trained models be feasible? Nicely packaged up with a
nice case etc - people don't need to know it is a RPi in a box etc. Store
images/video locally with optional "cloud backup" as an paid-for add on?

I have had basically everything in my house shutdown before when my ISP had a
"maintenance event" \- could not turn lights on, could not use a baby monitor,
could not turn the heating on etc etc because everything wanted to talk to the
cloud even though my lights and heating are physical things inside my house.

Apart from that, some nice online integration would be good - IFTTT, MQTT
(bonus points for local broker support to avoid cloud), and a public API etc
so people can wire it up to their home if they want (e.g. unrecognised face at
door? => turn on lights, dog on lawn? => turn on sprinklers etc etc)

~~~
mrafiee
Are you suggesting not using cloud for privacy concerns? Based on the feedback
from people's comments here, I realize we should do more to alleviate the
privacy concerns. Curious on to know your thoughts about the following aspect:
As I mentioned, we only store short video clips corresponding to events that
the user created (we already discard the other motion clips that are deemed as
irrelevant by our models.) We also allow users to delete the the alerts they
have received and when they delete each alert, we permanently delete the
corresponding video clips from our dbs... would that alleviate your privacy
concerns?

We actually built our first prototype using RPi, we tried 3-4 different RPi
cams, the image quality of all of them was very poor. Also the final cost
would much higher than the cameras we are using right now...

Supporting IFTTT is in our near term road map. Appreciate the suggestions!

~~~
mattlondon
It was more that if my internet connection goes down, are the cameras useless?
What if the internet/AWS is just "slow" one day - will the notifications be
delayed significantly making any "reactive" integrations pointless/ludicrously
delayed? If things can run locally (doing inference for multiple cameras via a
single "box" you plug in to your WiFi router etc) then you can be super-fast
with IFTTT integrations.

My main line if thought was that I built basically your product for spotting
when a cat climbed into my plant pots using ML and a RPi3 - the idea was that
when it saw the cat, it would squirt a water pistol at it to scare it away -
inference on the RPi 3 was too slow (if I was doing this now I'd use a coral
accelerator maybe) and by the time it realised a cat had got into the plant
pots, the cat had already taken a shit and left. I worry that your product
might suffer from similar end to end latency. Niche use-case? Perhaps. I have
Amazon Blink cameras here and the IFTTT integration is delayed by about 30
seconds so by the time you get a notification there is someone at your door it
is to late to do anything as they will.have already left/kicked the door in by
then etc. Doing all this locally would be super fast

My main concern was not really about privacy - you'll need to cover GRPR if
someone from the EU happens to walk into frame of one of your customers'
cameras one day in the future anyway (Good luck)

~~~
mrafiee
Love that use case :) re your point about latency, that is one of the main
reasons we are doing all the inference on the cloud. Almost all deep learning
models (at least CV models) need GPU to run with low latency. That's true that
if you have set up an automated response from another device, it may still
work if the internet is down but for alerting the user, you would still need
internet connection even with a central hub...

~~~
pilooch
FTR, a simple RPi4 yields ~4FPS on a DL object detection model. You may need
cloud for your central hub, but neural network inference can be done locally.

~~~
mrafiee
By 4FPS do you mean 250ms latency per frame? What OD model specifically did
you get that latency from on RPi4?

------
01100011
If you want people like me to buy it, you've got to cut the cloud out of the
picture. Give me something that does inference on the device. Sure, give me an
easy way to send selected videos back to you for training data, and feel free
to push optional updates to the camera with updated models, but I'm not giving
you a raw video feed of my home or business.

~~~
mrafiee
The reason we went with the cloud is not just to use the data for training
data. 1- we wanted to be hardware agnostic so our solution works with any
hardware without any dependency on hardware specifications. 2- Doing deep
learning on the device would require GPU which would significantly add to the
initial cost for consumers. 3- as I mentioned in my response to another
comment, regardless of where the inference is done, the recorded clips will
have to be stored on the cloud so if a bad actor comes in and take the camera
with them, the user can still access the recorded video clips after the fact
to know what happened. Even though we do inference in the cloud, we do not
store the video clips unless they correspond to an event that the user is
interested in--we discard the other clips. So I'm not clear on how doing
inference on the device would have any advantage from a privacy stand point.

~~~
01100011
I get it. Moving things to the cloud keeps the devices cheap and keeps them
from becoming out of date. It also makes you identical to other large players
and makes me think you don't have much of an advantage. Make the devices
expensive. Put privacy first. It might just pay off with higher sales. Your
alternative is racing to the bottom in a competition with Amazon, Ring, etc.
You will lose.

Sure, you can push the video to the cloud, but encrypt it on the device. Let
me control my data.

~~~
mrafiee
Based on the feedback from people's comments here, I realize we should do more
to alleviate the privacy concerns. Curious on to know your thoughts about the
following aspect: As I mentioned, we only store short video clips
corresponding to events that the user created (we already discard the other
motion clips that are deemed as irrelevant by our models.) We also allow users
to delete the the alerts they have received and when they delete each alert,
we permanently delete the corresponding video clips from our dbs... does that
help alleviate your concerns?

~~~
01100011
Not really. Having a device send video frames to the cloud basically kills the
deal for me. If you did something to the video first... maybe. Let's say you
train a model to process video. You come up with a network where the first few
layers are fixed and they perform a non-reversible transform of the video into
some sort of symbolic representation. I might sign up for that. I want to know
that my video/audio feed isn't being used by a 3rd party, and that it isn't
being used by you for something other than the intended purpose(i.e. to model
my behavior to sell me things, to create profiles of my activity, etc). I
understand that my first proposal doesn't actually address all of those
concerns, but I am willing to trade privacy for convenience to a very limited
degree.

I'm basically working on something like this for myself. I have a Nvidia
Jetson Nano that I'm trying to train to tell me when my garage door is open
without my wife or I present, when my laundry is done, and whether or not the
lights are on.

~~~
mrafiee
That is pretty interesting but non-trivial. We'll have to think about it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I should mention our business model is not based on
monetizing users data. I'm interested to know more about your personal
project. Feel free to shoot me an email if you are interested in having
offline discussions and bouncing ideas off each other: rafiee at visualone dot
tech

~~~
bradknowles
Just because that’s your model today, that doesn’t mean you won’t get bought
by another company whose sole purpose is to use all assets for gathering as
much private data as possible and using it for their own purposes.

If you want to sell to people who actually care about privacy, then you have
to build your systems so that it is impossible to abuse them or use them in
any other way. Or, at the very least, it is extremely difficult to abuse them.

~~~
mrafiee
That is a valid point. We will think more deeply about these. Thanks for the
feedback.

------
Chromozon
Seems very similar to Camio ([https://camio.com/](https://camio.com/)) but
targeted at the consumer space. I like the clever wrapping of object
recognition and motion detection into real world actions- "dog getting on
couch". I think this can do well in the consumer space.

It's hard to bring this technology to enterprise because there are already
large companies offering similar video analytics capabilities combined with
complete video management solutions. See Axis, Briefcam, Milestone, Gorilla,
Agent Vi. And a lot of the VMS first companies have integrations with a spread
of analytics companies. You really don't want to spend your dev time creating
yet another VMS. Work on being able to integrate easily with others.

One huge advantage I see with you guys is that you can do everything in the
cloud. Most of the industry analytics companies require dedicated hardware or
servers with GPUs. But, these companies are targeting large installations-
100s-1000s of cameras across multiple sites. Your technology might work great
for 1-2 residential cameras, but I'm not sure how much it can scale to
industry.

Best of luck, anyways! I like the concept.

~~~
mrafiee
That is a great analysis. I completely agree with everything you said. We are
currently targeting consumer and SMB use cases and not enterprise/large scale
applications at the moment. Thank you!

------
inetknght
> _Our solution can also alleviate privacy concerns since we only store short
> video clips on the cloud for alerts corresponding to user’s events of
> interest instead of for every motion detected._

Do better: allow the owner to store everything locally instead of in the
cloud.

~~~
mrafiee
Well the problem with that is many people use the cameras for security also.
So if a bad actor comes and takes the camera with them/breaks it, there would
be no way for the users to get access to the footage after the fact to know
what happened.

~~~
nkrisc
The video wouldn't be stored on the camera, but an NVR or something similar.
But "locally" could also include a cloud storage solution of the end user's
choosing in addition to actually on prem.

If someone manages to steal one of my cameras I'll have some close-up, HD
video of them stored on my hard drive.

~~~
mrafiee
I see. So you mean for the VMS solutions, not the stand alone IP cams (such as
Nest, Ring, Wyze, doorbells, etc)?

~~~
inetknght
I don't know what @nkrisc, but I definitely mean: camera should be able to
store data on any standard sftp server. Or on a CIFS server for the Windows
dudes. Or WebDAV.

Want to store it in some proprietary cloud? That's fine, but it should only be
done as an afterthought. SFTP, CIFS, and WebDAV would enable any power user to
build and use their own home storage or cloud storage.

~~~
mrafiee
I see the value of what you are proposing but that would be useful only for
tech savvy users (vs mainstream)...

~~~
bradknowles
If you also sell the optional local storage device (a network video recorder),
then at least you give your customers the option.

Otherwise, you are not materially different from Ring or Google.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for the feedback. Our cameras have local storage but we do the
inference on the cloud. Our main value prop is more powerful event detection
features beyond what Nest is offering (Ring is not really offering any as of
now.) and at a significantly lower price...

------
kevin_nisbet
Congrats on launching. Some really fascinating ideas. Although I suspect my
biggest concern would be, the consumer electronics space is not fun to be in.

I'm curious if you've considered targeting small business at all, that maybe
had enough flexibility that consumers could adopt. I'm a board member of my
condo corporation (HOA), and our staff can struggle quite alot with scrubbing
through security camera footage to find events, mainly damage to the property.
So having a system that can say load all the video of a vehicle passing
through a garage door for the past two days would save a ton of time. Of the
feature you've described, on when something goes missing or damage appears to
the build would save lots of time.

Similar to alot of the sentiment in this post, because its monitoring of
public spaces, I likely wouldn't accept a cloud based solution. It's just
difficult to vet that companies are doing the right things and have a good
security posture, despite privacy policies. Simple cloud storage like an S3
bucket would probably be fine.

Anyways, best of luck on the launch.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for the feedback. We have been looking into some SMB applications
including property management. Would love to know more details about your use
case if you are open to an offline discussion. We are actually storing on S3
(and only store short clips for user's events of interest in the cloud.) Thank
you!

~~~
kevin_nisbet
Sure, my keybase contact info is in my profile. I'm also @kevin in the
Kubernetes and CNCF slack workspaces.

~~~
mrafiee
Great. I will follow up with you. Thanks!

------
blacksmith_tb
It's an interesting space, it strikes me immediately as the video version of
Minut[1] I got one their first-gen units and was pretty disappointed, but the
principle has a lot of potential. What I have really wanted to see from any of
these IoT devices is a workflow that goes - tell app you are going to teach it
to look for something (or listen), stage an occurrence, confirm the device
registered, then stage it again, and expect a notification. So for example,
"this is what its sounds like when the clothes dryer is done" \- dryer plays a
little song - app says 'got it' \- dryer plays its little song - notification
is delivered saying "your dryer says it's done". I don't think that's beyond
the capability of the hw and sw, yet I haven't seen a good implementation
yet...

1:
[https://www.minut.com/product/features/](https://www.minut.com/product/features/)

~~~
mrafiee
That was actually my vision initially when I started working on the problem. I
wanted to allow users to train their cameras for things they care about. But
later decided to start with events that we can detect without requiring a lot
of input from the users initially...

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I can see advantages to both, I am sure plenty of users want plug-and-play and
would be annoyed by the idea of having to work through manually training.
Maybe there can be an "advanced" or "developer" mode... Even just having a
feed of events that I could go into and add tags or other info to might work.

~~~
mrafiee
I like the idea of having a different tier for people who are more tech
savvy/patient. We currently allow users to provide feedback on alerts (thumbs
up/down) which we use to make the models more accurate over time but training
from scratch would require a lot more input from users...

------
krosaen
I've been waiting for something like this (and daydreamed about doing
something similar as a hobby) - what's holding me back from ordering
immediately:

\- How do I hook up an outdoor camera? Mounting instructions? Does it need
power? Wifi based? (guessing it will be: "straightfoward instructions", yes,
yes, but would still like details)

\- A privacy statement at the very least - and ideally privacy from the ground
up - perhaps via differential privacy, or maybe you allow users to pay less if
they make their unencrypted photos available to your training models. IMHO
privacy concerns are what are really holding back smart home tech and keeps me
from adopting it.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. Valid points and very interesting! We have been mostly
focused on building the technology before the demo and have been deferring
tasks like adding more details to the website, finalizing privacy policy, etc.
I expected that the focus on HN would be mostly on the technical aspects of
the product, but I am realizing that HN actually cares most about the privacy
aspects. We will make these a higher priority going forward.

To answer your first question, the installation/requirements for our cameras
are pretty much the same as the other stand alone security cams in the market
(Nest, Ring, Wyze, etc.) Basically, they require power (plug into outlets) and
require wifi connection.

------
llarsson
Smart of you to target Nest cameras, since those customers don't care about
privacy as much as HN readers that comment on threads like these do.

There is plenty of academic research done on this stuff (I know, because a
group at my department did these things for elderly care). Have you looked
into this, or are you making your entirely own thing from scratch?

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks :) we are definitely trying not to re-invent the wheel. We have been
using various open source tools that are available and have been building on
top of those... if you know of something that you think would be particularly
useful for us to look into, I would love to know about it.

~~~
llarsson
Dipak Surie was at my department. His work focused, as I understood it, on
learning what tasks people were trying to perform and what actions were
included in those. Say that a person with dementia may be trying to make
coffee, and would forget what they were doing halfway through. The system
would understand that and help out by saying what the next action should be.

[https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=-mxqfbIAAAAJ&hl=sv&...](https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=-mxqfbIAAAAJ&hl=sv&oi=ao)
is his Google Scholar page.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. Sounds pretty cool. We will look into it!

------
smashah
This will be major as a home assistant integration. Right now the nest camera
component is broken due to the recent Nest=>Google migration. This has broken
streaming nest cam footage for everyone that migrated. I'm actually surprised
a 3rd party has actually gotten support for nest cam stream API before home-
assistant itself.

Anyways, when it comes to security cams in the consumer space you have

Low: Wyze, Yi, other Chinese Mfgs Mid: Ring High: Nest

But I think the major money is in the prosumer space: The custom Dahua
(Lorex/Flir) or anything with an NVR. Massive false positive rate, bad
detection algos, shitty software. Have you seen Lorex's Rapid Recap feature?
Definitely cool but too expensive. Also Dahua NVR's have had security concerns
too

Rapid Recap:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIWnQ9arSJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIWnQ9arSJg)
CCTV Hacked:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ea9fllnME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ea9fllnME)

Smart local secure powerful NVR replacements is what business + prosumer home
owners are looking for, good thing is that most IP cameras are running on a
handfull of standards, instead of a seperate API for each brand.

How did you get access to the NEST API streams?

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. I had not seen those. Need to look into them more closely.
We have been focused on stand alone cams. Nest shut down their APIs last year
but they allow users to share their camera streams.

~~~
smashah
So you require the Nest streams to be public then???

~~~
mrafiee
yes but a random url that you get is private (only people you share it with
would have access) and you can change/invalidate it anytime.

------
avip
All leading camera brands have on SoC motion detection (Honeywell,
Motorola...) and they have ML driven detection on their on premise stream
servers. This is going to be a very tough sell.

~~~
mrafiee
There are various cameras on the market claiming to have smart alert features
but in reality the only AI features that they are currently offering (that we
are aware of) are person detection, unfamiliar face detection, facial
recognition, activity zones, some limited object detection... if you know of
any solutions offering beyond those, we would love to know about them... also
these features come at a high price both in terms of the initial hardware cost
and monthly fees (e.g. Nest Cam IQ selling for $300-$400)

~~~
mike_d
Axis has super advanced AI/ML video stuff. I've seen demos of it doing things
like "use a network of PTZ cameras to auto track the person who left an
unattended bag".

They have lots of free applications in their App Gallery, and with minimal
effort cheap Chinese cameras can be made to work with the system (since Axis
OEMs their cameras from them anyway). [https://www.axis.com/en-
us/products/camera-applications/appl...](https://www.axis.com/en-
us/products/camera-applications/application-gallery)

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks! We will look into it.

------
sarora27
I see huge opportunities for this type of technology to be used for Security
operations at Houses of Worship, Sports Arenas, and Large Buildings if you're
thinking of a B2B angle.

FWIW, I've seen a few other companies pop up offering a similar service to
that market and are doing well. Lots of security operations centers are still
manually run w/ 100s if not 1000s of cameras being monitored by a team of
humans (to the best of their ability).

Good luck! This is an awesome idea!

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks. Appreciate the feedback and the kind words! We will look into the use
cases you mentioned.

------
maartn
Great work. If you can make the service GDPR compliant and get certification
you are probably 2 steps ahead on any big brand where it concerns Europeans.
Distrust towards built-in AI on devices like Ring and Nest is growing. Is
offering a white label version on your roadmap?

~~~
mrafiee
Thank you! Great feedback. We are actually GDPR compliant but don't have the
certification yet. The cameras we are offering are indeed white label cameras.
They are the same cameras as the ones sold by Wyze...

~~~
mjul
Congratulations on launching. It is a very fascinating tech space.

Could you elaborate how the system as a whole is compliant with GDPR and other
European privacy laws?

I ask because I explored and eventually decided not launch a computer vision
product (in 2014) due to compliance aspects.

Looking at it from the whole system perspective, with a camera pointed at your
neighbour's garden or the street in front of your home it is quite difficult
to make a compliant system:

First, there are the hurdles of the GDPR (it has to be a legitimate purpose,
the subject has rights and must be informed etc....).

Second, there are the broader privacy laws for public spaces, where it is
mostly illegal with exceptions for government and some specific use cases for
banks etc. (I am familiar with Danish rules, not those of every EU member
state).

I did meet a startup some years ago that claimed that their computer vision
was not video surveillance since they did the video stream processing on-
device and only emitted events (not video) to the network, so perhaps there is
a way to do it nowadays.

I would love to hear your perspective on the current compliance concerns for
this type of computer vision systems.

~~~
mrafiee
Thank you! I guess I should not have said that as we have not looked into all
the nuances yet (some of which you mentioned), but we have taken many extra
steps to design the product/architecture with the main principles in mind from
the beginning. For example, what we store, how we store them, allowing users
to have control of their data (as an example, as I mentioned in another
response, we allow users to delete the alerts and when they delete an alert,
we permanently delete the corresponding video clip), and of course if a users
decides to delete their account, we permanently delete all of their data.

------
rubyfan
Why don’t you partner with Wyze, Nest and Ring instead of trying to go direct
to consumer with your own camera? Direct customer acquisition and operational
complexity of dealing with hardware, inventory, etc. seems outside your core
business. Wyze would seem like a great first start since they lost their
person detection partner Xnor to an Apple acquisition some months ago and they
have millions of cameras in the wild today. Really all of them are trying to
build the type of detection you have.

~~~
mrafiee
That is a great suggestion and is indeed our plan even though we are also
offering our cameras now :) Thanks!

------
bsenftner
If you have any hopes of selling your software to fortune 500 enterprise class
customers, it needs to be software, not software as a service, able to operate
self-contained, as in capable of running on an air gapped network without any
Internet connection. It should also integrate with Genetec, the VMS industry
leader.

~~~
mrafiee
I agree with that. We have not been looking into enterprise applications much
yet. The main limitation of using self-contained software is it would be
dependent on hardware specifications (especially GPU) and can pose significant
limitations and a lot of complexity.

------
abol3z
I have a smart home startup running in the middle east, and we want to develop
the exact same idea in the future. The only difference is the cloud part.
People here (and I assume many other countries) hate the cloud, they want
everything running locally and with a minimum subscription. So we've been
brainstorming a solution similar to camect[1] that handles everything locally.
We still have a long time to reach that since the market here is at least 5
years late that USA.

Do you consider building this kind of device in the future?

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/camect-world-s-
smartest-m...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/camect-world-s-smartest-
most-private-camera-hub#/)

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. Yes we are aware of them. I’d like to know more about what
you’re doing. Please shoot me an email if you’d like to talk: rafiee at
visualone dot tech

------
MaxikCZ
This is exactly something I have been looking for a long time. At least I
thought so, until I got to the "cloud" mention.

You missed the train with cloud. People are becoming increasingly privacy
concious, and more and more are adpoting "once its on the net, I have lost
control of it".

I fully understand that getting the clips to teach the neural network is
important from your side, but this is dealbreaker even for people that would
otherwise be willing to pay monthly just to use the software locally. Perhaps
asking for "send us this clip please, so we can train the software" from time
to time would be acceptable.

If your concerns is being hardware agnostic, consider selling the "local only"
option with strong disclaimer that only narrow subset of hardware is
supported.

~~~
mrafiee
I see your point and appreciate the feedback. The main issue with local only
is having it to work reliably on different types of hardware would be a major
undertaking itself (aside from the technical restrictions that come with it)
and would not allow us to focus on building the AI...

------
frequentnapper
can you put up an "about" page on the site? I would like to know a bit about
the team and the founders before I purchase home cameras from them.

~~~
mrafiee
Absolutely. We have been heads down working mostly on the product to get it
out before the demo day but we will make that a high priority. thanks for the
feedback!

------
jujodi
One of the things I noticed that you're offering is cloud storage for the last
7 days. If you're building a consumer facing product (vs. trying to have your
technology/company integrated into one like Nest) I'd recommend exploring
additional options here. Storage is so cheap and it always bums me out that
the offerings are so bad or expensive. For example, I feel as though I should
be able to hook up my blink, ring, etc. all into the same S3 bucket for my own
long term storage.

Also - I don't see a privacy policy on your site. Are you using people's video
to further enhance your models?

~~~
mrafiee
I agree storage should not be as expensive. I think many companies use that as
a leverage to make users pay a subscription fee (due to lack of services
that’d compel users to subscribe.) We are finalizing our privacy policy and
will add ASAP. We are not using users data for trading models for other users
currently but we do use their feedback on the alerts to improve the models for
their own events.

------
frankdenbow
Seeing a lot of companies doing these for b2b applications. Are you fully
focused on b2c?

~~~
mrafiee
We are looking into various areas and are trying to find the best niche to
focus on initially--does not have to be b2c necessarily. do you have any
specific b2b application in mind?

------
ackbar03
I think its a decent although not particularly unique idea. How much of a
grasp do you have on the actual tech though? Detecting things like dog chewing
on a a shoe is not trivial, just putting it through a model you found and
edited a bit on github probably isn't going to cut it. Also you already have
these AI powerhouses with strong technology who are capable of making
something similar and haven't found that much success (e.g. nest)

~~~
mrafiee
I agree the idea is not unique at a high level but this is an unsolved and
difficult problem. We are building a solution block by block. The only event
detection features Nest is offering is person detection, unfamiliar face
detection, facial recognition.

~~~
ackbar03
right, so you guys are mostly trying to stand out with the tech then, that's
totally cool. Good luck and all the best!

~~~
mrafiee
Thank you!

------
fudgy73
This is something I've been thinking about doing for a while. How soon after
the event occurs does the user get a notification?

~~~
mrafiee
Our end-to-end latency is about 3-4 seconds now but we know we can bring that
down to less than 2 seconds in the near future and maybe even less than 1
second in longer term.

------
maz1b
Best of luck Mohammad Rafiee! This is really neat. Is there a reason you guys
are pricing so low?

~~~
notduncansmith
No "About" page, no privacy policy. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but there's
probably a lot more to be made off collecting data from the cameras than you
could expect to charge consumers.

~~~
pletsch
The lack of an About page is weird.. I don't think you are being too cynical,
the lack of information about this company on their site is concerning.
Especially considering they are selling cameras you put in your house.

I'm also surprised by the name they chose, as Visual One is already a software
product by Agilysys. I would be surprised if it's not already copyrighted?

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for the feedback. We have made it a high priority to add more details
to our website asap.

------
tyagis
> We currently support Nest Cams and also offer our own cameras (same as the
> cameras sold by Wyze) with indoor and outdoor options.

How are they your cameras when they are Wyze's? I think you may want to
correct the language here to eliminate any confusion.

~~~
mrafiee
That is a great feedback. I will change the wording in the post to clarify but
they are actually white label cameras that Wyze is selling and we are using
the same white label cameras.

------
z-cam
Can I hook up my existing Wyze cams or install your firmware on them?

~~~
mrafiee
Technically that is possible but it is a very involved process (and does not
always work), also you would not be able to use Wyze's service anymore...

~~~
z-cam
Thanks... you've probably got lots on your plate right now will keep an eye on
Visual One! If there is enough demand I'm sure you'll invest more in the
firmware retrofit, or maybe I'll buy some of your cameras

------
andreshb
Just to confirm, it can count when it’s a new person but if they enter again
it will know it’s the same person and not count them again as new ?

~~~
mrafiee
That is correct with the caveat that their face must be visible/detected. At
the moment, we count the number of unique persons using facial recognition.

------
kopochameleon
Can you make an add-on temperature sensor that detects and alerts for fevers?
This is what we need urgently, everywhere

~~~
mrafiee
That is a very interesting use case with everything that is happening right
now. We are exclusively focused on computer vision but I agree that would be
very valuable for a situation like this.

------
cloin
Unfortunately, you have to make your Nest streams public to be able to use it.
I’m unwilling to do so.

~~~
mrafiee
please note that the url you get is random and only people you share it with
would have access. Also you can change/invalidate it anytime.

------
soared
Envysion is the b2b version for restaurants/retail if anyone is curious.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. We will look into what they are doing.

------
frequentnapper
can the model be trained for something more complex like shoplifting?

~~~
mrafiee
We have heard that specific use case quite a bit. Detecting shoplifting is
very hard as there is not much visual distinction between a customer picking
up an item to buy and someone shoplifting, at the moment they pick up the
item. It would require tracking the person and verifying that they paid for
the item which can have a lot of complexities...

------
Camille_Fr
Great job, you are addressing a huge problem! What about B2B?

~~~
mrafiee
Thank you! We are now exploring consumer and SMB but may also look into B2B
use cases more closely at some point. If you know of any good b2b use case,
please do let us know.

------
12xo
Is this ONVIF compatible?

~~~
mrafiee
Not yet but that is in our roadmap. Please feel free to email me at rafiee at
visualone.tech and I will keep you posted as we add the support.

------
Dnguyen
Very similar to Arcules (arcules.com), which is a start up backed by Canon.

~~~
mrafiee
Thanks for sharing. I need to look more closely but on a brief look it seems
the only event detections they are offering is person detection, car detection
and people count...

------
xmkcof0
Physical security of their premises is their problem.

I refuse to trust someone who is using such a flimsy excuse for defaulting to
slurping up images of my property.

Here’s a thought: enable it to push the data to a different backup source?

But no no no let’s give in to your pipe dream.

No thanks tech industry.

~~~
dang
Substantive, thoughtful critique is welcome on HN, and many users have been
posting such comments in this thread. That's great.

This comment, though, breaks the site guidelines, and that's not ok. Please
read and follow them when posting here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22560528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22560528).

p.s. In addition, could you please stop creating accounts for every few
comments you post? We ban accounts that do that, which is also in the site
guidelines. You needn't use your real name, but for HN to be a community,
users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well
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forum.
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