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Given the volume of activity that happens in India - on roads, railways, malls and manufacturing units - having cutting-edge monitoring and security solutions is highly sought after. And, for adoption in the price-sensitive market, they have to be made affordable.
Back in 2005, Kapil Bardeja, Anoop Prabhu and five professors of Computer Science founded Vehant Technologies as part of an IIT Delhi incubation program. Their goal was to indigenise technologies with expertise in video and X-ray imaging.
Kapil Bardeja, Co-Founder & CEO, takes us through their journey starting with under-vehicle scanners to today, innovating for traffic enforcement and toll collection for volatile Indian roads.
An Innovative Start
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Vehant’s first product, an under-vehicle scanning system, was built, funded by the Ministry of Information Technology. In light of the 2001 Parliament attack, the security apparatus needed scanning technologies and the Vehant team took up that challenge.
The project saw successful commercialisation, and today, they have sold over 1200 scanners that have been deployed at high-security locations like the Prime Minister's Office, the President's house, Parliament, Indian Defence bases, and even hotels like Marriott and ITC.
From there, Vehant continued to innovate and develop products and launched a license plate reading system for law and order purposes. Stolen or suspected vehicles could be monitored and tracked, and the system would generate alerts. Security personnel could then easily track the trajectory of the vehicle and catch the vehicle.
Building onto that technology, their next venture was in traffic enforcement. They built systems to spot speeding, red light violations, triple riding and no helmet in addition to the number plate reading. “We had the best OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine in the country, reading at a very high accuracy.”
Gradually, more security products were added to their portfolio, including X-ray baggage machines and today, they are the only Indian company qualified to deploy machines at airports. “We have sold over 1,700 X-ray machines installed at multiple locations, including 90 airports.”
Building India-Friendly Products
“Indigenising products is not as straightforward as taking a Western prototype and reverse engineering it,” Kapil tells us, adding that while it might work for the hardware when it comes to the software, Indian security requirements are very different from the Western requirements.
For example, you are allowed to carry a small scissor in French airports, but not in Indian airports. This means the system must be smart enough to detect small threats like a blade, pin, or a small scissor for the Indian security requirements.
Even in traffic enforcement, they faced ample challenges related to the lane-indisciplined traffic we see in the country. “In a three-lane road in India, you will have four cars and three two-wheelers between them.” Their systems had to be built to capture the speed and license plates of all seven vehicles.
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Add to that our non-standard license plates in unique fonts and languages. “You cannot tell people to change their plates, so we worked on adapting the technology to read those plates.”
Deploying Futuristic Solutions
Vehant has three major focus areas in product development. One is adding millimetre wave scanners in Indian airports, which is a whole-body imaging device used for detecting objects concealed underneath a person’s clothing. The device can detect the increasing number of plastic threads. They are also working on cabin baggage CT machines, the next level of X-ray scanning technology with high reliability of detection.
The government plans to replace the toll collection system, FASTag, with a GNSS-based (Global Navigation Satellite System) tolling system, and Vehant plans to capitalise on that. A part of the GNSS system is the validation of vehicles.
“The system without a camera is a dumb device because a truck driver could take the device of a four-wheeler and pay a lower fee as per the tolling structure.” To overturn that flaw, a validation and an audit system using cameras will have to be deployed. A classification of vehicles and a number plate reading will be done through their AI-imaging.
Another key development in enterprise analytics is deploying intelligence to existing cameras in the manufacturing sector. The software can aid in the optimisation of operations and also work as a safety feature. “We are trying to derive analytics from the existing cameras.” The software will detect if the personnel is wearing their jackets, face masks or helmets.
A Kaizen Approach
“Since we were an AI-imaging company, the quality of images was paramount. Because if you have garbage in, you have garbage out.” Improvements in the quality of cameras, a drop in the cost of bandwidth, and developments in AI have fuelled Vehant’s technological offerings, putting them at an inflexion point where AI can be used effectively and cost economically with a reasonable accuracy rate.
Being in a technology-reliant segment, none of their products stay relevant beyond a five-year period and the company has to continuously upgrade products every two years. And apart from an initial angel funding, the company is primarily bootstrapped.
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But on the bright side, there has been a massive shift in the accuracy of computer vision and today, models are also fairly easy to train. “Some people say being bootstrapped is an achievement, some people say it's foolishness. But either way, we are happy the way we are,” Kapil signs off.
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