Soon after the announcement of the Defence Procurement Procedure in 2016, Optimized Electrotech started as an indigenous tech company, focusing on image surveillance.
For a long time, India has been dependent on technology imports for situational awareness. Israel and China have acted as the global hubs for military and civilian surveillance tech, respectively. But with the wave of self-sufficiency rolling, India has started pacing its efforts for the retention of its intellectual property and indigenous manufacturing of defence goods, which significantly include hi-tech surveillance systems.
With the imperative of being as good as the Israeli technology and as cost-effective as the Chinese systems, the Bengaluru and Ahmedabad based Optimized Electrotech Pvt Ltd (OEPL) was set up in 2017 as an imaging surveillance technology company. In the complex maze of various kinds of surveillance, including digital, physical, and cyber, OEPL threw itself into electro-optics. Claiming to fuse AI in its systems, the startup gave rise to smart surveillance platforms with minimal need for manpower-on-alert.
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One of its latest products, called NoctVision, is an automated long-range day and night surveillance system. It undertakes the application of long wave IR manipulation, thermal (TIR) imaging cameras, and visible (VIS) light spectrum technologies. NoctVision, as the name suggests, enables zero-light imaging.
Being AI-enabled, NoctVision keeps learning lots of classifications. For example, it can directly differentiate between a man and a woman, or among military vehicles, infantry vehicles, and civilian vehicles. It can even tell you whether it saw a monkey or a moving animal, as per MD of the company, Sandeep Shah, who says, “You can also do face recognition of the human being from around 300-400 feet.”
Its applications vary from border surveillance to critical infrastructure protection. In this product, OEPL has onboarded a 360-degree moving camera with multiple elements on it. It is laced with a thermal and visible imaging system, distance measurement capabilities, and a compass. On top of it, it has onboard GPS, NavIC, which is India’s own regional navigation satellite system (IRNSS).
On the question of increasing concern for privacy amid hi-tech applications, like face-recognition in surveillance systems, Shah says, “I’m sure that the lawmakers are going to be cognizant of the fact that we can’t be naive and open ourselves to all the fragility that comes along with the ban on such kind of data. At the same time, if you want to protect your citizens, you can always set a time limit for its storage.”
The thought process behind naming the startup went like this: Optimized because they “provide solutions which are neither expensive nor below the level of international quality;” Electrotech because they are “eventually a technology products company, purely based on electronics.”
Co-founders of Optimized Electrotech (left to right): Anil Yekkala, Dharin Shah, Kuldeep Saxena, and Sandeep Shah
The company is aiming for a larger manufacturing/assembly facility in either Gujarat or Karnataka. The startup’s biggest milestone would be to make a single module compatible with the acquisition and processing of images from space, vehicles, and naval ships on a simple civilian-type camera. “If a single module can do all of that, I think we would have achieved our own vision, the vision of being ubiquitous, the vision of being at all the places by virtue of our values, without at all being dependent on other countries,” concludes Shah, with a sparkle in his eyes.
