Interview: Developing and Deploying a Privacy-Preserving Vision-Based Sensor System for Commercial Real Estate

In the U.S. alone, commercial buildings contain roughly 70 billion square feet of space. Constructing, operating and maintaining this space consumes a tremendous amount of resources. Yet, facility operators typically have little insight into how their spaces are utilized. XY Sense set out to develop a solution that allows facilities operators to obtain accurate, real-time information on how spaces are utilized, enabling informed decisions about how to adjust and allocate their spaces. XY Sense’s solution uses wide-angle cameras to collect real-time occupancy information over large areas while preserving privacy and security. In this interview with Jeff Bier of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, Luke Murray, CTO of XY Sense, introduces the key requirements of the application, and explores some of the challenges that XY Sense overcame in developing and deploying its solutions—including monitoring people’s movements without compromising privacy—and the approaches the company employed to overcome these challenges.