We are delighted to announce that PanaCast 2 with Intelligent Vision 2.0 has been shortlisted for Collaboration Product of the Year in the 2018 AV Awards

PanaCast 2 is the world’s first 180° 4K Panoramic Plug-and-Play video camera that delivers big benefits in the huddle room and classroom where its industry-leading field-of-view ensures that everyone and everything is visible at the far end.

Intelligent Vision 2.0 is the latest development from the PanaCast development team.  A powerful AI tool, IV2 identifies people in the room and provides a live headcount for third-party applications.

The AV Awards are now in their 20th year and this is the 2nd year that the PanaCast 2 Camera has featured in the final.  We narrowly missed out on winning last year, but our hopes are high for a win in 2018.

The AV Awards were established to recognise excellence across the Audio Visual Industry.   The aim of the AV Awards is to reward innovation and best practice, whilst encouraging others within the industry to raise standards across the board.

PanaCast 2 – 180° 4K Panoramic Video Camera

PanaCast 2 with Intelligent Zoom has been recognised for providing a new and innovative solution to meeting the challenges created by modern huddle room and classroom deployments where a much wider field-of-view is demanded than can typically be achieved using legacy PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) cameras or low-cost webcams.  WIth PanaCast 2, everyone in the room is always in shot with whiteboards or flip-charts being clearly visible thanks to its industry-leading 4K (UHD, 4 megapixel) resolution.

And PanaCast 2 can capture a best-in-class 180° field-of-view without the excessive fisheye-type distortion typically created by single-lens, wide-angle cameras.

Introducing the New Intelligent Vision 2.0 Suite

The Intelligent Vision 2.0 suite is based on cutting-edge AI employing convolutional neural networks (CNN) and machine learning techniques that can analyse the live video and provide on-the-fly information about what the camera is seeing.

Features of the Intelligent Vision Suite

The Intelligent Vision product suite includes:

• Intelligent Zoom 2.0: Intelligent Zoom 2.0 for the Panacast camera runs in the host PC and delivers significant enhancements over the in-camera capability with a new AI head detector and temporal filtering added.  The system automatically zooms in and out on the video frame to include all meeting room participants, so it’s easier to enjoy a more immersive and consistent video conferencing experience.
• Head counting AI (People detection): In-camera detection technology in the PanaCast system is available through the PanaCast API.  This allows 3rd party software apps to poll a count of the number of people in the room at any given time.

The key applications for this data are:

• Room booking systems may monitor the live usage of rooms, detecting no-shows and enabling an empty room to be released back into the available room pool improving availability for users and enhancing room utilisation.
• Rooms that are not in use may be powered down to save energy and CO₂ emissions
• Room system monitoring and management systems can capture utilisation data over time providing insight into room usage patterns. This data can then be used to inform decisions regarding future refits and new builds and to optimise room design and utilisation.

180° Vision means 180° Sensing

PanaCast detects everyone in the room.  There’s no point in sending a head count of people that happen to be in the field-of-view of a camera that can only see part of the room.

For more information about PanaCast 2 please click here 

For more information about the AV Awards please click here