Outside Retail, RFID in Smart Cities

Past few years I have looked at RFID in retail perspective - Inventory Management. We work on RFID solutions that enable real-time inventory management and improving stock efficiency by tracking

• Restock
• Misplaced Items
• Replenishment Items 

RFID is a major player in Retail for Inventory Management. Millions of items are tagged and tracked using RFID based Inventory Solutions.
I had an opportunity to visit smart city solution provider. The solutions they covered were

• Waste Management
• Parking Management
• Smart Lighting
• Video Monitoring
• Environment Management
• Surveillance
• Command Centre

Waste Management - The bins are equipped with volume sensors and RFID tags, They are designed with batteries lasting 10 years. They provide details when the Truck and the bin connects, the RFID event is alerted

Intrusion Detection - Sensors placed for Motion detection during the area to alert if Someone comes closer to the area

Environment Management - This is basically measuring pollutants in the air and reporting the trends/patterns

Traffic - This is more of heat maps to reflect the patterns / crowded areas

Command Centre - All the calls are routed/tracked here. Provides a lot of data on issues/queries/ complaints / accidents / reporting any incidents.

Parking - This is based on sensors placed above / below parking lots

State of Art - All of this implementation are mostly based on sensors / RFID. This visit provided a lot of insights into data collection, framework, real-time alerts of end-to-end infrastructure.

Where is Video Analytics here?
Before the visit I was under the assumption a lot of video analytics, people counting use cases would be there. Actually, most of the things are achieved with RFID, sensor-based events. Video Analytics is yet to make a mark in implementation. But down the line in the next few years, we would see a lot of video analytics on the data collected.

• Crowd Detection
• Use of Drones for Monitoring
• Gender Detection from Surveillance Cameras
• Vehicle Number Detection and Reporting
• Face Detection and Indexing at Landmarks
• Loitering
• Audio-based analytics to detect gunshots/sounds/ accidents

A lot of use cases, RFID + Video Analytics will further strengthen Smart Cities Solutions portfolio.
Happy Learning!!!