Thanks to in-house development, more than 400 cameras within Ternium´s industrial plants help prevent coronavirus from spreading. Get to know how it works.
If an employee walks less than 1,5 meters away from a fellow employee, the camera system –run by artificial intelligence- will detect him, and he will appear on the screens framed in red. The same will happen if he´s not wearing a face mask. In case of a breach, the program will automatically take a picture and register it in the Occupational Health and Safety Management System, after doing so, the corresponding manager of the sector will use the information and therefore, it will be possible to work on the reinforcement of prevention rules for COVID-19.
The Video Analytics system was tested between May and June with algorithms developed by the company that allows us to verify the distance between people and their use of face masks. This development is one of the most recent efforts to adapt industrial facilities and operations to share a new life with coronavirus.
The software is used since 2018, mainly for industrial safety duties: It was created to focus on monitoring the compliance of life-saving policies, and the technical team has found new opportunities for use.
“We found out that, with the previously developed software, capable of detecting people and measure spaces between suspended cargo or moving vehicles, could be of use to measure the distance between people and help prevent COVID-19,” says Carolina Filipello, Project Leader and the link between developers and industrial safety and prevention experts.
“The cameras allow us to lookup close to people´s faces and see if they were wearing a face mask, and we started to run some tests. Within two weeks, we were implementing and fully working with the software for both scenarios, and the algorithm was functioning with the cameras,” she adds.
Implementation began in Argentina, and a few days later, it reached Mexico and Brazil, explains Andrés Gómez, Product Development Manager, who coordinates the software programming team. By the end of June –he indicates- there were more than 400 cameras all around Ternium capable of identifying the full compliance of the measures against COVID-19. Out of these, 170 are already activated, and the configuration process continues.
“Camera alerts are sent to the Health and Safety system. With that information, supervisors can quickly determine which actions to take. It is a development-focused in the prevention and the immediate response taking care of people,” Gómez says.
The information is added to the one generated by thermographic cameras, capable of detecting if a person is running a fever, these cameras were installed in the course of the last few weeks in all entrance checkpoints at every facility.
Right from the beginning of the pandemic, the company established specific measures to avoid infection, including social distancing, the reconfiguration of dining halls and transportation, temperature checking in all entrance and exit checkpoints, the reinforcement of cleaning and disinfection of every space, amongst other actions. Besides, the face became part of the personnel´s mandatory protection equipment for employees as well as contractors and visitors.