Artificial Intelligence

Lasers and artificial intelligence from Somerset could help us maintain social distancing


A company based in Frome is championing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that it claims could be key in helping enforce social distancing or stopping terrorist activities.

Level Five Supplies, which has been based in Frome over the last 18 months, has been pitching SENSR software across the world, which could be used very easily to monitor social distancing in busy city centres or streets and help police and other law enforcement identify problems.

It uses non-harmful infrared lasers to register the presence of objects such as pedestrians and track where they go and patterns of behaviour. The SENSR system uses LiDAR (light detection and ranging) systems, which have been used as far back as the moon landings of the 1960s.

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Level Five CEO Alex Lawrence-Berkeley says this has a wide range of potential uses and said it worked a little like “training a dog”.

He said: “It works like your eyes but better. In the same way animals can see and absorb more information than us, so can LiDAR. It works by using infrared lasers and emits them all around the area it is situated in.

“What it can do is to send a small piece of encoded energy via an infrared light into the surrounding area, and when that energy bounces back off an object, because it’s specifically encoded it tells you where it’s come from and how long it was travelling before it bounced back. This means you can identify where an object is and its position.


“If you have more than one laser, you can build up a system and can track the behaviours of all kinds of objects in 3D, and not just people. For example, it can track if a car is speeding across an area even if no speed cameras are present.

“We teach the AI to recognise what is a pedestrian, what is a bicycle, what is a car, what is a lorry by teaching it the basic shapes but it doesn’t recognise any specifics, like the gender of the pedestrian or the make of car, so there’s no privacy issues.

“It’s a bit like training a dog, a dog doesn’t recognise the colour of a ball, it just sees a ball and wants to play with the ball. This intelligence identifies the type of object and reacts accordingly without needing the specifics. It doesn’t matter if a car is a Honda or a Ford or whatever, it just sees and registers the presence of a car in that space.

“For example we can look at hundreds of people in a city square and we can not only count how many people there are but work out how far apart they are standing, all in real time, even though it doesn’t tell us exactly who they are.”

The system is currently in use around the world. Mr Lawrence-Berkeley said it is heavily used in South Korea, in places like airports and shopping centres, and car manufacturers BMW in Germany use it for security and social distancing measures.

Mr Lawrence-Berkeley, who moved to Frome in February 2019 and currently operates his business out of Frome Business Park, says the potentially “very influential” software could be beneficial to public health as well as police and law enforcement agencies.

He said: “If the camera notices a crowd seems to be breaching social distancing, CCTV can then be used to further investigate and see who these people are and local police can respond to that and try to separate them or check they are wearing masks.

“If someone goes into an exclusion zone or there is some kind of incident, we can track where pedestrians that were at the scene have gone, we can work out their trajectory, how tall they are and then we know where they are in a 3D space which helps police potentially track suspects or witnesses.

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“If there is a terrorist incident, it makes it possible to track who was in the area at the time as well as potentially identifying people acting suspiciously in real time before anything occurs, which allows police to act.

“It’s the same technology that driverless cars are using – by using the software, the car can recognise what objects around it and where they are in a 3D space, and be programmed to know how to react to them, all in real time.

“It can also programmed to obey the rules of the road and perfectly observe and react to every road sign. It’s like having the sum of all the world’s best drivers. It’s still a small project at this stage but it could be very influential.

“It’s all about protecting the public and helping local law enforcement combat the kinds of problems they have to deal with.”





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