In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, understanding how people move through a variety of spaces is essential for creating efficient, safe, and responsive environments. Digital Mortar is at the forefront of this movement, providing a comprehensive cloud-based flow analytics and people-measurement platform. They take data from lidar, camera and electronic sensors and integrate it into a single view of the customer. Digital Mortar’s focus is on providing full-journey tracking – the ability to follow customers throughout an entire location – and the analytics that go along with that including path analytics, funnel conversion, and segmentation.

In this Q&A, Gary Angel, CEO of Digital Mortar, dives into the impact of their partnership with Seyond and how Seyond’s cutting-edge lidar technology enhances the company’s flow analytics capabilities. Together, they’re transforming industries ranging from retail and transit to urban planning, offering a powerful combination of high-density, cost-effective, and privacy-conscious sensors. Gary discusses everything from Seyond’s integration process to real-world applications and shares exciting glimpses of what lies ahead for people-measurement technology in large-scale environments.

Seyond: Why did Digital Mortar choose to partner with Seyond? Which sensor do you use? 

Gary Angel: We use the Robin sensors. We’ve been doing more and more of our work with lidar sensors – particularly in our work with larger spaces. Lidar provides so much flexibility, coverage and detail that it’s become our go to technology for most larger-scale people measurement applications. The Seyond sensors provide the high-beam density we’ve found necessary for accurate tracking in crowded environments, flexibility around beam pattern, very competitive pricing, and we love the solid-state reliability.

Seyond: How does Seyond’s lidar technology integrate with Digital Mortar’s platform? 

Gary Angel: It’s a super-straightforward integration. We onboard the sensors directly in the software and ingest the low-level object feed. That means we’re ingesting time stamps, object ids, object classifications, and x,y,z coords at 5-10 frames per second. Our integrations are particularly nice in that we don’t rely on vendor Perception for setting up line crosses or areas of interest. All of that happens in our very robust digital mapping configuration tool in the cloud.

Seyond: How does Seyond enhance Digital Mortar’s core analytics capabilities? 

Gary Angel: The better the lidar and perception combination, the better the measurement. We do a lot of cleaning on people-measurement data but the simple fact is that the less cleaning we have to do, the better the analytics are. With high-beam density sensors, the fine grained detail provided is much more likely to identify people in a crowd, keep them separate, and – most importantly – track them consistently over time. We also find that the limiting factor in many crowded environments is the number of moving objects the perception software can track simultaneously. We can fix that by creating separate instances and fusing them together in our platform, but that adds both complexity and cost. The ability to track lots of moving objects, classify them correctly, and keep track of them, doesn’t just make our life better, it means every report our clients access has more signal and less noise.

Seyond: What kinds of real-world problems can Digital Mortar solve with the help of Seyond? 

 Gary Angel: People measurement has so many applications and use-cases that it’s always surprising me. Some of the most common include queue management, occupancy and crowd monitoring (including crowd density), curbside and vehicular monitoring, full-journey tracking in retail stores, integrated display measurement and personalization, parking management, remote operational systems, and dynamic allocation of labor based on usage or need. Just to give you a sense of how varied the use-cases are, we have clients that measure shopper performance in stores and that turn on lighting or adjust air-conditioning based on crowds; we have a landfill customer that publishes vehicle wait times by measuring how many vehicles are in each line; we have a transit client that measures how many people are in each car of a train so that passengers on the platform can load-balance, we have an airport client that measures queue times and usage or restrooms for dynamic maintenance; we even have a drawbridge client that uses measurement to make sure no one is in a no-go area before they raise the bridge.

Seyond: How does Seyond’s lidar compare to other data sources that Digital Mortar uses? 

 Gary Angel: In one sense, most people measurement technologies provide the same data: where someone is at any given time. The three things that distinguish data sources from a quality perspective are their accuracy in people detection, the quality of their over-time tracking, and the quality of their object classification. The first and the third are largely (though not exclusively) a function of beam density – where the Seyond sensors really shine. Lidar sensors in general also benefit from their implementation flexibility – you can mount them in a lot of different places and because coverage is so broad you aren’t constrained by limited mount points of options. And, of course, many people really appreciate the strong privacy story that lidar sensors provide. They really can’t be abused and in today’s world that’s a significant win.

Seyond: Can you give an example of how a client has benefited from using Digital Mortar and Seyond together?

 

Gary Angel:: We’re using them to cover train platforms – which turns out to be a great use-case for this kind of sensor. We get full advantage of the long sight-line coverage, and we waste far less of the beams than we do with dome or puck style lidars. Train platforms are huge and provide a great example of the kind of use-case that would have been cost-prohibitive only a few years ago.

Seyond: How does using Seyond contribute to sustainability and smarter urban planning? 

Gary Angel: There are so many uses for lidar in urban environments that have the potential to make lives better and safer. We’ve gotten used to the ubiquitous presence of security cameras, but lidar can do that same work without the negative privacy implications and often with better performance. Simple things like understanding how many pedestrians are waiting on a corner or whether bike lanes are being used. One of the underappreciated aspects of people-measurement is how many fundamental urban planning debates revolve around simple usage patterns. All public policy is about allocation of resources, and if planners and lawmakers don’t know what’s really being used, those allocation decisions are basically just guesses. With comprehensive people measurement you answer those questions. That makes grant-writing easier. It makes planning better. And it makes resource allocations more effective.

Seyond. How has this partnership set Digital Mortar apart from competitors in the ITS industry? 

Gary Angel: We’re not really a classic ITS player. Obviously there is a robust and very useful market for traditional control systems and lidar is a great part of that toolkit. But our focus is more on the broader analytics necessary to do effective planning and manage public services most efficiently.

 We bring incredibly detailed and rich analytics to the table and wherever there’s a need for that, there’s a need for what we do.

Seyond: How does the integration of Seyond Lidar contribute to broader advancements in the ITS industry?

 

Gary Angel: Analytics is the next frontier beyond control. Intelligent point control is essential for good ITS systems. But we’ve left all that data uncaptured or sitting in isolated pools where no one can take advantage of it. As we start to deliver solutions that build robust analytics and reporting into the ecosystem, planners and engineers get the ability to drive continuous improvement in systems in ways that were simply never possible before.

Seyond: What are some of the future possibilities for the Digital Mortar and Seyond Lidar partnership? 

Gary Angel: We’re starting to do a lot of work in outdoor events, stadiums and arenas – areas where solid-state lidar has considerable application. I think there are great opportunities there to do better parking management, improve perimeter monitoring, and do a better job identifying and preventing crowd-crush and similar problems. We’re also getting involved in Performance Applications – tracking players on the field. That’s traditionally been done with video ML or wearables, but lidar has some significant advantages lowering the cost of generating performance statistics and improving their detail and accuracy. Because of the unique coverage requirements, that’s another area where we think the unique coverage and performance characteristics that Seyond brings to the table will really tell.

Want to learn more about Seyond’s sensors? Contact us: https://www.seyond.com/contact/