In May 2020, Herta was awarded with the COVID-19 Seal of Excellence certificate delivered by the European Commission (EC) for the project AWARE. AWARE was sent for evaluation to the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Pilot. As stated by the EC, the EIC Accelerator Pilot offers Europe’s brightest and boldest entrepreneurs the chance to step forward and request funding for breakthrough ideas with the potential to create entirely new markets or revolutionise existing ones.
Highly innovative SMEs with a clear commercial ambition and a potential for high growth and internationalisation are the prime target. The 20th of March 2020, the EC made an urgent call through the EIC Accelerator Pilot for technologies and innovations that could help in treating, testing, monitoring or other aspects of the Coronavirus outbreak. The COVID-19 Seal of Excellence is a highly competitive quality label awarded to project proposals which were evaluated to have a high excellence and impact to deserve funding in this special call, but did not receive it due to current EC’s budgetary constraints.
AWARE proposes a hybrid edge and distributed solution for advanced video analytics, including real-time face recognition and crowd behaviour analysis. Part of the computing pipeline is executed on-premise, on low-power and small-size edge stations using deep neural network accelerator hardware. This allows saving costs and increasing the system’s scalability, efficiency and ease-of-installation. Herta’s cutting-edge algorithms, which are able to identify people even when wearing masks and monitor crowd density, are integrated in the solution. The automatic control of social distancing and the identification of persons in access controls without the need of removing masks become vitally important to control the spread of COVID-19, and are Herta’s main focus to fight against the pandemic.
