- What does Fivegen mean?

- Translated from English,  Fivegen would mean fifth generation. This acronym could be interpreted in different ways. First, our legal entity was established at about the same time with the fifth generation (5G) networks announcement. Moreover, Fivegen stands for 5 persons, who at the time of the foundation of the company headed 5 then key operational areas, and by the way, the very same persons have been leading these areas to this day.

Our team features talented engineers and researchers, getting a job with our company is rather difficult due to rigorous selection process. But once you are hired, we would do anything to raise professional skills of every employee.

Integrity is key to working both internally and with our customers. One of our important rules states: “Do not speak of anything that is not available, do not promise anything we cannot deliver”.

- What customers do you focus on, and who are your potential customers?

- We, as a corporation, are primarily focused on large b2b segment and on b2g. We have extensive experience in in-house development and implementation of “smart city” components: starting from city/enterprise video core and ending with analytics modules for territory monitoring. Our potential customers are those seeking to develop processes and resolve tasks with use of cutting-edge technologies, often lacking deep expertise. That’s why we are ready to explain, present cases and develop projects even under tight budgets and vague requirements.

- They say that Russian companies are the best in the machine vision sector. How does Fivegen feel on this market? What are your competitors and how competitive is this market overall?

- Our top management quite often gives us an opportunity to visit business meetings and exhibitions in various countries, including for the purposes of learning international experience in real-life communication. Sometimes we get a chance there to “touch upon” some “Smart City” related solutions, particularly, machine vision. If we leave out face and license plate analytics, required for any “Smart City”, some specific solutions for keeping streets clean, environmental monitoring, road surface wear etc., are very rare.

If we travel to Russian cities, then similar specialized video analytics are either run under pilot projects, or are in active use. Many Russian companies have developed a proper engineering approach for resolving such tasks. There are, of course, companies limited to open-source solutions only. But collectively it could be said that Russian companies are most certainly among the top ones in terms of computer vision approaches and useful solutions. Today there is considerable competition.

– Could you today say that the country now has a comprehensive robust system of urban intelligence-based development?

- Russian regions have been following the right track of transformation, starting with “Safe City”, then moving on to “Smart City”. At the same time, “Safe City” provides for an extensive system of video surveillance with facial and vehicle recognition modules. “Smart City” stands for a layer of urban improvement analytics, monitoring of administrative violations, environmental conditions. Many cities are now running pilots and implementing solutions to ensure comfort of residents, having taken care of their security.

It is obvious that Moscow has stepped across the Smart City concept threshold long ago. The way I see it, today it houses a complex digital urban ecosystem, integrating video surveillance, AI, big data and the Internet of things. Other Russian cities have been making great strides over the latest 5 years toward full-scale digitalization. This applies to both large and medium cities – pilot projects for AI implementation and Industry 4.0 components are actively tested and contracted. City residents would only benefit from this: digitalization of this kind is focused on automating urban security and improvement processes.

- How would you describe “Smart City” weak spots? Do its highly sophisticated technologies make it vulnerable? For instance, a computer virus could completely paralyze a city

- The zero phase for digitalization of any city would provide for building infrastructure: DPCs, communication channels, data protection facilities etc. These infrastructure requirements would obviously rule out the majority of vulnerabilities.

- “Computer Vision” is yet another major area of your operations, it helps monitor graffiti at building façades, bus stops and poles, dirty road signs, overflowing bins and many other things. It’s no secret that this is covered by the unique FG-Nestbox-01 software suite, developed by Fivegen specialists. How efficient is this system?

- The solution features a miniature hardware computer unit, placed into a trunk of a car, and two video cameras for filming road surface and road shoulders. Computer algorithms search in real time for any urban environment and road management violations, sending identified violations, geolocation, computer status and video streams (on demand) to a situation center. So, this gives the customer a view of city services on an interactive dashboard, and also provides information on driver performance during the day. All identified violations could be processed on a portal or transmitted to a controlling body vie integration.

It is important to note that the device is readily removable, it does not affect vehicle fleet maintenance warranty. For this very reason customers often use their enterprise and service vehicles for this task.

Two or three of these devices are sufficient to fully cover all roads of a medium-sized city over a week. This solution enables automated collection of road surface condition data, completely free of human factor.

- Which video sources do you use with greatest efficiency?

- One of our products that we regularly sell and keep developing is our proprietary “video surveillance core”. The core has been in development for more than 6 years, and over this period we have been working on such a rich spectrum of video streaming, recording and processing tasks, that we can say with confidence that Fivegen today works with any video data sources: starting from urban video surveillance and ending with delay-free streaming from moving objects, mobile phones, body and dash cams, web cameras, professional video equipment etc.

- How dependent is your company on foreign suppliers and what is the level of localization of your products?

- Since our primary field is software development, then the foreign market obviously has no direct effect on us.

We have also completely eliminated, down to zero, the impact of indirect foreign tools, assisting in development – these are code storage software solutions, record keeping, IDE etc. We have done this with Russian alternatives or isolated local hosting.

- Is it true that Fivegen engineers are developing detectors for “wintertime” violations – snowdrifts on roads, at sidewalks, public transport stops?

- Automatic video recording of dangerous situations in wintertime is one of the most important areas of municipal improvement. Excessive snow on rooftops, icicles, snow “slush” on roads and also snow “caps” on public transport stops every year cause injury-risk situations – hundreds per year, traffic accidents – thousands per year. This is why we fight snow-related situations in various ways: via recording violations with Nestbox means or via video surveillance assets, mounted on rooftops and building facades.

- What are the purposes of the Sentinel VMS system? 

At the outset, the first goal of the company was to develop a proprietary secure video streaming protocol, which would operate in an unstable network (3G, LTE, radio channel) with an option to adjust quality to network capacity, with broadcast delay less than 1 second, with further opportunity to recover archive in original quality. This solution has later grown into a comprehensive VMS (video management system) – a platform, enabling connection of almost any sources of video data for archive recording, multiplexing, video and audio streaming for content recipients. This system is widely used at local sites with classic IP video cameras and in cloud video surveillance over geographically distributed sites. Our VMS system could be installed on commonly used dash cams and on scalable cloud resources, accommodating connections of tens of thousands of devices.