Introducing Ouster Gemini

Ouster Gemini is a perception platform designed for smart infrastructure and optimized for digital lidar. We built it to address a critical need in the smart infrastructure industry: a platform that is intuitive to use and provides accurate spatial object information. Camera-based systems are complex, unreliable, and inaccurate, leading to high lifetime costs, false alarms, and missed events. Other lidar-based systems do not leverage the true power of high-resolution digital lidar and are cumbersome to integrate. Customers need a better, simplified solution. Gemini is that solution. 

Gemini provides unique spatial intelligence by detecting, classifying, and tracking objects with centimeter-level accuracy. Our team has purpose-built the platform to make lidar-driven insights more accessible. With Gemini, customers can cover more square feet with fewer sensors, dramatically reducing the time and cost of integration. That space is represented visually in 3D with live feeds from multiple lidar sensors, providing one continuous view and making it effortless to track an object across the entire area. Optimized around Ouster’s digital lidar, Gemini can detect pedestrians out to 90 m (~300 ft) in all directions with a mid-range OS1, giving users ample coverage across their entire site. Within that coverage, customers can easily configure inclusion, exclusion, and event zones in 3D and output real-time or aggregate analytics associated with each zone. And all of this is done while preserving the privacy of the people being tracked.

Let’s walk through all of this piece by piece.

Complete Situational Awareness

Gemini is a lidar-based perception platform, giving it the range, coverage, detection accuracy, and continuous tracking that come with lidar technology. On coverage specifically, lidar sensors are capable of being stitched together to expand coverage areas, similar to a mesh wi-fi network. This continuous large area coverage enables you to move beyond counting visitors or behaviors in a silo, and instead capture the entire visitor journey through a space. Armed with this information you can understand how visitors travel through a space and where they spend their time. 

Accurate object tracking

Many sensor types like cameras, door counters, and radars suffer from inaccurate or incomplete counting statistics. Powered by our digital lidar technology, the Ouster Gemini platform delivers incredibly accurate people detection through day and night.

When combined with the ability to track a single person continuously from sensor to sensor, the platform delivers highly accurate people counts, preventing double counting, and the ability to distinguish between visitors just passing through versus true visitors stopping and spending time in a location. The Gemini platform delivers data on total visitors in an area, unique visitors, time spent, the full path of travel of that visitor, and more.

For a security applications, the platform can detect if a person has entered a physical area, how fast they are traveling (for example, running or walking), and how long they have spent in that area in order to trigger alerts.

Easy setup and familiar administration

Gemini delivers powerful analytics features, and on top of that, is easier to install and administer than traditional people tracking solutions. That platform consists of a familiar architecture – Ouster lidar sensors installed in all areas that you want coverage, which are all connected back to an edge processor (our Ouster Catalyst box, or your own processor), and that processor houses Gemini perception software that outputs the tracking data for analysis or alerts.

With the detection range and field of view of our OS lidar sensors, the Ouster Gemini platform can reduce your sensor count by up to 10x while covering the same physical area with more robust tracking. The coverage areas of our different sensors, assuming no obstructions, are:

• OSDome: ~13,000 ft² (~1,200 m²)
• OS0: ~41,000 ft² (~3,800 m²)
• OS1: ~280,000 ft² (~26,000 m²)
• OS2: ~750,000 ft² (~70,000 m²)

All of these sensors have different fields of view, and coverage will depend heavily on sensor placement and obstructions (occlusions) in the area.

To process the incoming lidar data, the installed lidar sensors connect back to either our Ouster Catalyst edge processor, or can connect to your own edge processor on location. With Gemini running on the edge processor, the sensors are simple to connect and align so you can begin building your own zones for tracking and alerts.

Protects privacy in public spaces

Lidar sensors are capable of identifying the presence of people, without the visual detail of ‘who’ that person is. This capability is because lidar technology captures a full 3D representation of the environment around them, identifying people volumetrically based on their shape and the space occupied, rather than visually.

A new stage

Launching Ouster Gemini is a huge step forward for Ouster and our customers. The platform provides new capabilities to unlock the power of lidar technology, making it easier to use and delivering never-before-possible analytics.