Surveillance cameras are all well and good for reviewing events such as mass shootings and violence after the fact. But what if surveillance cameras could respond in real-time to lower the number of fatalities during such an event? This question is the inspiration behind the development of cameras that could sound alarms in real-time, potentially de-escalating a dangerous event.

The Athena Security Company and its CEO Lisa Falzone are offering such a device with an AI-based camera capable of collaborating with third-party systems to communicate with people, freeze elevators and lock doors during an event, thereby potentially saving lives.

Described by VentureBeat as "a startup that's developing a machine learning layer for security cameras in retailers, corporations and schools," the Athena company is preparing to launch the cameras, which they announced are capable of "instantly and accurately recognizing an active shooter before they shoot." In response, the camera will send out an alert to law enforcement.

Already installed in one U.S. school (Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster, Penn.), makers of the camera believe that the gun-detecting artificial intelligence has a 99% rate of accuracy. "Since the gun detection is so accurate, the company is working on including recognition of other dangerous scenarios, such as knives and fist fights," said one report.

In speaking to the occurrence of false positives, the company explained on its site that once a threat is detected, a monitoring service will validate the legitimacy of the threat and only involve law enforcement when necessary. Even if false alarms are triggered by the camera, the company believes that the system would learn from such scenarios.

According to VentureBeat, the system includes "a Nvidia 2080 RTX graphics card and computer vision to detect what Falzone calls 'dangerous objects' — specifically guns. (Future versions will spot knives, too.) The AI system ingests footage from off-the-shelf security cameras and looks for 'dangerous motion' at a rate of 30 frames per second, alerting school administrators (or the police) via an app when a threat's detected."

For more on the camera, go to Athena.