I'm not the original poster, but we just completed a demo of their system in one of our retail stores. I myself, as the lowly technician was quite impressed. My managers were all quite impressed as well.
My bosses boss was the one who saw them at a trade show, possibly the same one John met them, I can't recall. One of the Vegas shows. We operate casinos and several retail stores, and I guess AnyVision is in a few vegas casinos.
We trialed it on our most robbed store, that was also under going construction, using two existing cameras. We did have some issues with the one camera at first, but the folks at AnyVision were quick to help us tweak the settings. They also did remind us quite frequently that were were operating on a loaner laptop (Though a Alienware one), performance would be hindered because of that.
We just added a few employees to the watch list (as well as many images of real people we were looking out for), and then had them walk in and out of the store several times through out the period we had the demo.
The success rate for capture was pretty good. I myself have facial hair and glasses, and noticed if I used a higher resolution image of myself, just about anyone with a beard and glasses would get picked up as me. Less so if an image captures from the actual camera onsite was used as the reference, but it still happened.We did get several misses, but that went down after some tweaks with AnyVision on the phone. Our employees were also doing a lot of things to intentionally fool the system. Wearing sunglasses, putting on a hat or a hood, looking down at their phone, things like that.
We even managed to get positive ID's of some actual people on our real watch list, from shitty images originally captured who knows where. Of course we were not live monitoring the system (Limitations with our IT department, nothing to do with AnyVision), so it served us no good stopping the person from robbing us, but in a live scenario the managers seem to think it would.
Either my boss heard this, or maybe I even saw it somewhere, there was a claim they can capture from any camera and any angle, but during our demo they did indicate optimal viewing is between 0 and 15 degrees. One of the cameras we trialed it on was at about a 18 degree viewing angle, if my math is right.
I didn't see pricing myself, but from what I hear John is right, it is quite expensive. You don't have to buy hardware (servers) from them, but their spec requirement is quite high so equipment costs will be high. A really good GPU is needed, we're looking at just doing two cameras per store and were recommended a minimum 6GB of GPU memory.
The software was pretty easy to use, from my point of view. A lot of initial setting up and tweaking, and I would even consider a burn in period. Maybe that's standard for Ai stuff, but this was my first foray into anything AI. For the first week or two there was a lot of tweaking to make things just right. We've even found we will probably need to move some of our cameras if we go with the system, catching a lot of side shots of peoples faces, because of how they enter the store and where the camera is. But again, that doesn't have too much to do with AnyVision, we were still getting positive hits on our test subjects with side shots.
Towards the end we tried putting in a higher resolution camera for our entry one and started picking up a puddle on the ground as a face. The image did sort of look like a face? You could see what looked like a nose, and eyes, and a weird little puddle mouth. I think that just comes down to needing to tweak things and go back quite often after the set up to verify as the new camera sat working over a weekend before it started picking up puddles as faces.
Everyone I personally spoke with at AnyVision claimed they were coming out with a new version of the software that would add a lot of features people were asking for. Of course I lost my notes as to what that was, it sounded like quite the update to their software. Better user permissions, auditing and stuff like that. As the engineer I spoke to called it, the "less sexy things". A more of an engineer update, vs a sales update.
