New Technology Will Enable First Responders To See Through Smoke

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A new technology by will let its users see through smoke, snow, fog and low light conditions.

Mutualink, Inc., a provider of secure interoperable communications solutions, announced an exclusive master licensing partnership with Orlando, Florida based ProHawk Technology Group, Inc. that will enable Mutualink to deliver new powerful real-time video enhancement technology to the US public safety and FirstNet customers.

ProHawk Technology enables live streaming video obscured by environmental conditions such as fog, darkness, snow, and smoke to be enhanced and corrected to provide views of hidden or obscured objects in near real time, under 20 microseconds.

The ProHawk capability will be integrated into Mutualink’s interoperable communications and media sharing platform. The patented technology can work with any standardized video camera stream source output or remotely in the cloud, according to businesswire.com.

“The ProHawk real-time video enhancement capabilities are incredibly impressive and there are many valuable applied uses for the US first responder community,” said Mark Hatten, CEO of Mutualink, Inc. “The ability to see objects and persons of interest otherwise hidden from normal view due to prevailing conditions provides smart cities, public safety and emergency responders with critical information that would otherwise go undetected.”

Public security video cameras and other surveillance assets are outdoors, typically hanging from infrastructure or mounted on vehicles, aircraft and drones. “Every day is not a perfect viewing day and in the case of disasters there is significant likelihood of less than optimal viewing environments being present. This makes this technology especially relevant and needed,” according to Hatten.

According to Joe Seebach, Chief Commercial Officer and founder of ProHawk, the video enhancement technology is unlike anything else available in the market. “Our patented technology operates on a sophisticated one-pass algorithm that enables nearly instant processing and enhancement results. The initial use case for our technology required video enhancement to be simple to use, reliable, and real-time or the consequences could be deadly in real-time security or crisis situations,” said Seebach.

He also pointed out that the ProHawk technology is necessary for any real-time Artificial Intelligence analytics and sensors. “ProHawk technology clarifies video in real time and then it can be passed to machine vision processing with significantly better results. We’ve seen this work especially well in low light license plate recognition (LPR) and facial recognition systems.”