Graymatics, Inc. – A Game-changing AI Powerhouse

We have developed an industry-leading, scalable cloud platform for deep multimedia analytics, with a rather rich suite of tools leading to wide array of image- and video-centric solutions for search, curation, recommendation, and security: Abhijit Shanbhag, President & CEO Graymatics, Inc.

The advancements and speed of technology innovation are catapulting the retail industry forward into an exciting new future. Inside this new retail world, retailers and brands are limited only by their imaginations. Using the latest innovations as the undercurrent – things like mixed reality, machine learning and AI technology – you can now truly put customers at the center of your business.

These innovations are turning out to be a weapon for bringing stickiness in the online stores. It saves the retail industry from the recent disruption by riding the innovation excellence to delivering data backed experience.

In light of the above mentioned, we are thrilled to present Graymatics, Inc., an intelligence-based security expert.

The firm’s cloud platform provides solutions to security providers, retailers, publishers, ad networks and other service providers globally.

Graymatics was established in 2011 and is headquartered in Singapore.

Interview Excerpt: Abhijit Shanbhag, President & CEO

Can you brief us about the history of your company?

Graymatics was set up with the vision of having a massively scalable platform to transform videos and images into actionable data. This effectively allows any application which currently utilizes text to obtain context, to as easily use images and videos. We have since developed a highly scalable, cognitive multimedia analytics platform that provides a solution for all the possible industries like Surveillance, Telecom, Media and Advertising, Retail and E-commerce and helps them cater to their various requirements holistically.

Can you provide brief information on your service/Product offerings and how does it benefit your clients?

Some of our solutions are listed below –

Retail and e-commerce Solutions

Our e-commerce platform, harnessing intuitive machine learning technology, analyses the distinct visual features of each product to recognize brands and products from images and videos and create targeted recommendations and deep insights into a customer base. We use this business intelligence to develop customized solutions for industry-leading e-commerce providers and consumers. The retail and e-commerce solutions can provide support with functions such as Click & Shop (Mobile), Click & Shop (Web), Catalog Organizer, Customer Behavioral Analytics, and Contextual advertisements.

Marketing Intelligence Solutions

Powered by machine vision, smart indexing, and neural networking, we offer a range of marketing intelligence solutions to enable consumer-facing companies to build up their knowledge of customers’ preferences, behaviors, and trends in real time. The digital marketing solutions can provide support with functions such as Contextual Advertising, Visual Search, Video Categorization, Video Search, Scene Search, Video Analytics and In-depth Consumer Insights.

Telecommunication Solutions

Leveraging on the insights generated from our multi-pronged cloud platform, we work with telecom operators to augment their own big data solutions with highly effective, user-centric personalization capabilities. The telecommunication solutions can provide support with functions such as Multimedia Keyword Search, Media Auto categorization, Click & Shop, Video Search, Image Search, Contextual Advertisements, Consumer Insights, and Collage Builder.

Graymatics @ Home

We partner with industry leaders in the home appliance market, creating IoT products that meet the needs of the next-generation consumer, and the next-generation business. Our IoT solutions can provide support with functions such as Smart Oven, Smart Refrigerator, and Smart Television.

Security and Surveillance solutions

A smarter solution is necessary in order to go beyond the limitations of manual monitoring. Our plug-and-play Smart Surveillance technology uses image recognition and artificial intelligence to proactively scan roads, car parks, and secure installations, empowering even the most basic CCTV system to keep your premises safe. Our security and surveillance solutions can provide support with functions such as Traffic Monitoring, Number Plate Recognition, Vehicle Detection, Monitoring and Vehicle Counting, Recognise car make and model, Car Park Monitoring, Parking Assistance/Parking Guide, and Premises Monitoring. Its not only limited to Vehicles but also includes People and Clothing analytics. Like People counting and tracking, people demographics, in-depth clothing attributes like neckine, color, pattern, sleeve length and much more.

The company’s cloud based online platform allows automatic real-time indexing, analysis and classification of videos with a suite of search, curation, recommendation and advertising tools enabling security providers, retailers, publishers, advertisement networks and other service providers to do content-based analysis of video and other digital media.

Understanding Video Data is Much More Complex

What does it take to find the video you’re looking for? For the most part, a lot of effort. While it’s easy to store and share specific videos, search functions are often limited. This is because video data is a lot more complex.

For instance, a camera can capture details such as colour, facial expressions, product labels, music and more through moving images but the average video platform would only understand a file’s content by the metadata text (eg. file name) provided.

Even YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video platform with over 60 hours of video uploaded in a minute, is limited by these constraints. Finding a specific video on the platform first depends on the video uploader manually providing an accurate title (eg. “Charlie Bit My Finger”) and an appropriate set of tags (eg. “funny”, “child”, “home video”). Next, the user looking for the video has to use the same or similar terms in their search query.

How do you position yourself in the current domain? How do you amalgamate latest technology with business objectives?

Current market disruptions revolve around extensive image analytics typically for security which lacks real-time analysis and live video analytics. We help perform not only image and video in-depth analytics but also perform audio analytics in the real-time which helps detect voice direction, emotion detection, and suspicious noise. Any unwanted activity is thoroughly checked, and the video analytics can infer such a situation and can alarm the required authorities without any lag.

Who are your big clients?

We initially launched our in-depth image analytics solution with companies like Hakuhodo Inc., which is a Japanese advertising and public relations company and with the biggest Telecom in Japan - KDDI. Enhancing their customers experience and as well as gain insights from them were few of the many use-cases for which the platform was used. Lately, we have many other big players in the market as part of our clientele which includes key players in Vietnam and Japan.

What is it that differentiates you from others in the domain?

Our deep video/audio analytics platform sets us apart from others. It has the following critical differentiators:

• Depth of analytics is unparalleled in industry, making it an ideal platform for surveillance, retail, telecom and other segments;
• Massive scalability of the platform, making it ideal to meet requirements having large video feeds either from CCTV’s or internet videos;
• Versatility with cloud, client data center or on-premise software ready for deployment;
• Rich set of tools allowing for a ‘solution-ready’ technology for System Integrators for quick deployment.

What are the challenges faced by you and your company?

As Graymatics is amongst the first in the market with the unique capabilities, there is a pioneers’ challenge in evangelizing a new set of products and services to traditional clients, altering their mindset in venturing into new spaces which can bring in

massive opportunities in the future. This is an evolution in the companies’ mindset and workflow, and with time, we find a large number of companies moving on this promised path.

The Brain Behind the Picture

Abhijit Shanbhag, President & CEO: Prior to founding Graymatics in 2011, Abhijit Shanbhag has been a serial entrepreneur within Silicon Valley and co-founded his first company in 2001 - Scintera, a leading fabless semiconductor company which developed the industry’s first programmable RF signal processor, and was later acquired by Maxim Integrated. Mr. Shanbhag has previously held key technical and management roles at Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Morphics. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where he continues to be on the Advisory Board.

“A large majority of today’s platforms are limited to analysing text- or binary-based data. Yet, across the Internet, over 26 billion photos and over one billion seconds of video are uploaded daily. This is a huge amount of information which Big Data and search engines have thus far been unable to make sense of.”