Omron to release network camera for monitoring babies, pets

Omron's network camera

TOKYO —

Omron Corp has released a wireless LAN-compatible network camera featuring a face recognition function.

The camera, “Human Vision Compo Kazoku Mesen,” comes with Okao Vison, which is the company’s image recognition engine (software), and enables to monitor a baby or pet in a room with a smartphone via the Internet.

The maximum resolution of the camera is 1,280 x 720. It can shoot images of the room with an angle of view of 100°. It is set up on a wall or special mount and combined with a smartphone application.

The camera is accessed via Omron’s cloud-based authentication server. After authentication, data is directly exchanged between the camera and the smartphone application. Therefore, images taken by the camera are not transmitted to the server.

The dimensions and mass of the camera are 70 x 42 x 70mm and 100g (or 70 x 67 x 147mm and 287g with the mount), respectively. Equipped with an infrared LED lamp, the camera can take images in a dark room. The price of the camera is ¥29,800 (including tax, approx US$249). It will be released Sept 11, 2015, on Amazon.co.jp (and Rakuten in mid-September).

The newly-developed network camera can detect/estimate 13 items. Specifically, it can recognize a face, detect a face, hand, human body, pet, moving object and voice and estimate a gender, age, facial expression, facial orientation, eye line and closed eye. As the first applications using those functions, Omron plans to release two applications, Kazoku Mesen Akachan (for monitoring a baby) and Kazoku Mesen Pet (for monitoring a pet), on the same day as the camera (Sept 11 for Android OS and late September for iOS).