Mr. Donovan: Founded in 2003, Guardian Technologies International is a software technology company with a primary focus on our unique technology for imaging analytics and informatics that can be applied to any digital image format. Whether it is an image off a mobile phone, a satellite or baggage scanner, if it's in a digital format, we can analyze it irrespective of where it falls on the spectrum of light, even infrared or ultraviolet. We currently have 25 employees. Almost 80% of our staff fall into the technical arena, and they are made up of physicists, imaging scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists. Every one of our employees has been with the company at least four years.
Our Intelligent Imaging Informatics (TM) platform, known as 3i, is revolutionary in its approach to imaging analytics. Up until this point, most companies have attacked the problem by eliminating from the image those things that they know not to be what they are looking for. So in other words, they are subtracting data from the image in an effort to find that item in the image that they want to find. We take an entirely different approach. We replicate that image over and over and over, and then we attack each of the replicated images with a specific transformation, such as an imaging filter, a histogram or an algorithm, trying to cause the image to change in very, very specific ways. And from that, we capture all the metrics that come off of that transformed image. We then feed that data into a very sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence, a Support Vector Machine, which analyzes the data. And based on the truth that we gave it about what we are looking for, they can determine the metrics that have the highest correlated value to the truth and separate them from non-truth.
In the case of explosives detection, there are items like peanut butter, honey and chocolate bars that are known to cause false alarms. Our PinPoint threat detection technology, based on our 3i platform, is unique in the industry in its ability to discern subtle differences in the density and composition of those three non-threat items from actual explosives. We are able read each item's unique fingerprint, allowing us to then segregate and discern their identities. Our Intelligent Imaging Informatics platform is very, very broadly applicable; it's not limited to security but can be used anywhere where there is a digital image and a challenge to find information within that image.
The security industry really grew up as a result of 9/11. The security equipment manufacturers came into their own at that point. And since 9/11, they have virtually controlled the marketplace. They have closed operating systems, which means that they do not allow any third-party software to attach to their scanners. And in a lot of cases, the manufacturers do not even have any form of an image transport system that would allow a government or a third party to extract and capture the bitmap image that is produced. In the security industry right now, the people that are providing the automated detection solutions are the hardware manufacturers themselves. Generally their automated detection solutions are based on finding the Z-effective value of the items that are in the image. They know that explosives fall within a certain range of Z-effective values; and they know that explosives generally fall within a certain density range. Their systems flag anything falling where those lines intersect and form a box as their target/threat area.
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