Huawei showcased several of its latest innovations at the India Mobile Congress 2019, New Delhi, including a smart city monitoring system, facial recognition doors and smart transport fleet that uses Raspberry Pi.

Although Huawei has been at the receiving end of the wrath of USA, which has inadvertently stalled the confirmation of projects in other places like India, its top-tier remains hopeful of doing business in the country.

“We’ve developed some enterprise solutions and use cases which are based on 5G and AI solutions such as smart cities, smart education. We hope India Mobile Congress 2019 is successful and will take us to the next level of India’s 5G journey, ” said Jay Cheng, CEO, Huawei India. “We are confident and committed to the digital India vision”

Smart City Monitoring Systems

The centre stage at Huawei was taken by the giant Smart City monitoring system demonstration set up. The system allows for real-time monitoring of various factors and happenings across a particular city.

The presented demonstration showed real-time statistics on a projected city layout. You could clearly see the city layout, traffic conditions, accidents, crowd density and so on.

The system would allow for a centralised monitoring station that can also double up as a first response centre in case of an accident.

Facial recognition doors

Another highlight for Huawei was their facial recognition entry doors. Huawei demonstrated their use case as possible airport entry doorways.

The demonstration allowed viewers to register their faces and then pass through the doors as they recognised the newly registered visitors and opened on recognition.

In the perfect conditions at the Huawei stall at the IMC, the doors worked flawlessly. However, how they perform in real-life conditions and how efficient they are as compared to something like the NFC card-based entry system on the Delhi metro is yet to be seen.

There are also concerns regarding user privacy. Considering the fact that the system will require facial scans of every person who’ll ever use them, they’ll need to be really secure for them to get a nod for installation practically anywhere.

Also read: Should you trust facial recognition technology? The ups and downs

Smart Transport Fleet

Developed in partnership with Tech Mahindra, the Smart Transport Fleet concept aims at solving problems regarding cab ride accidents, emergency services and logistics. It’s a plug and play device called Vetturino.

Effectively a black box for cars or a Vehicle Intelligence Blackbox as they call it, the device will monitor vehicles performance and other stats in real-time. It even transmits live video feeds and runs video analytics for both the driver and dashboard cams.

There are 160 parameters in total that can be monitored/controlled by the Vetturino. All this information will be accessible through their web portal. There are also compatible web and mobile apps.

The main component inside is Pi 3. Take a good look at the case and you’ll easily be able to identify the USB ports and the Ethernet adapter of the Pi. What else goes inside the box hasn’t been disclosed yet.

However, it is safe to assume that all the primary computation is running on the Pi 3 Model B. The Pi in turn connected to a small WiFi beacon inside the car to transmit recorded data.

Huawei saw the invitation to the IMC by the Indian government as a positive sign towards introducing their 5G networks in India. However, any such speculations have been rejected by the government over concerns regarding security and privacy of said networks.

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