Firm eyes perfect match

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: Carol Ethier, standing, president and CEO of Videology Imaging Solutions Inc., talks with manufacturing group leaders Veronica Smith, left, and Kirstyn Taylor. The team is producing precise eye diagnostics for their client, Carl Zeiss. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: Carol Ethier, standing, president and CEO of Videology Imaging Solutions Inc., talks with manufacturing group leaders Veronica Smith, left, and Kirstyn Taylor. The team is producing precise eye diagnostics for their client, Carl Zeiss. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Immediately after opening Videology Imaging Solutions Inc. in 1995, Carol Ethier said she often had requests to build cameras – but she had designed the business to do and be so much more.

The video, image capture and display technology firm – known as an original equipment manufacturer – captures images that can later be processed through biometric software for ID cards.

Ethier founded the company in Smithfield, because it was where she lived at the time. Now the company competes on an international scale.

“When we started, I required people working for us not to think provincially, but to think globally,” she said.

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Videology first produced security-oriented cameras, but Chinese companies flooded the market with lower-quality, lower-priced merchandise and the company began to lose its place in the market, she said.

After the market was flooded, Ethier said customers began to think this was an inexpensive technology to produce, the farthest thing from the truth for Videology. Cameras designed, developed and manufactured by Videology need to last for five to seven years.

“We have to choose industrial components and they won’t be as cheap,” she explained, whereas cellphone cameras, a competitor, are outdated within the year.

To balance out the losses, Ethier said Videology had to improve its product and promote it in a higher-end market. This landed them in the government sphere, she said, where they found a niche capturing still images from live feeds that, once run through biometric software, identify people at places such as border crossings, airports and information-secure locations.

Ethier wants to take the company further. The goal, she said, is a camera with built-in identification software that captures biometric-rich images, specifically through iris-recognition software.

“Iris recognition has so many points of uniqueness, not just at the surface level, but below – that it doesn’t change, basically from birth to old age,” said Ethier, who estimated there are roughly 256,000 identifiers around each iris, the colored part of the human eye.

An opportunity to set itself apart came in November when Videology was chosen by R.I. Commerce Corp. and Gov. Gina M. Raimondo as one of six Innovation Voucher recipients.

The award pairs Videology with researchers at Brown University’s electrical-engineering department, who, between now and June, with a $50,000 grant from Commerce RI, will pursue placing iris-recognition software in Videology cameras.

The pairing with Brown University, said Ethier, will help the company realize the final product.

“The more we can put into a camera, the more added-value,” she said, to help the company continue to succeed. “You can never relax with what you’ve got.” •

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