Safety Zone and Restricted Area Monitoring AI

Add a real-time zone layer to every camera on the site with vision AI for safety zone and restricted area monitoring.

Restricted Area and Intrusion Detection:

• Detect people entering restricted areas, robot cells, hazardous energy zones, electrical rooms, and exclusion zones drawn on any camera, with alerts, alarms, and equipment interlocks in real time
• Detect tailgating and unauthorized entry at controlled doors, gates, and turnstiles, and verify that only authorized headcount is inside a zone
• Track zone occupancy and dwell, so a person who has been in a hazardous area longer than the permit allows is flagged before the shift ends

Vehicle, Equipment, and Proximity Zones:

• Detect people in forklift, AGV, and truck lanes, in the swing radius of cranes and excavators, and behind reversing vehicles, and alert the operator and the pedestrian at the moment of proximity
• Enforce pedestrian-vehicle separation, one-way lanes, and crossing points, so a near miss is recorded with the clip and the pattern is fixed rather than forgotten
• Detect people under suspended loads, inside drop zones, and within machine guarding boundaries when equipment is running

Permits, Confined Spaces, and Systems Integration:

• Monitor confined space entries and hot work areas for attendant presence, entrant count, and permit windows, so a missing attendant is an alert rather than a citation
• Trend intrusions and near misses by zone, shift, and contractor, so the lane everyone cuts through and the cell whose guarding gets bypassed on nights show up as patterns
• Push events, clips, and zone states into safety, access control, and equipment systems through PLC and API integration, with a video record behind every alert and every near miss

Bring intelligence to every zone today.

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More About Safety Zone and Restricted Area Monitoring

What is safety zone monitoring with Vision AI?

Safety zone and restricted area monitoring with vision AI uses the cameras a site already has and deep-learning models to detect people, vehicles, and equipment, place them against zones defined on each camera view, and enforce the rules that apply to each zone: no entry, authorized headcount only, no pedestrians while a vehicle is present, attendant required, maximum dwell, and equipment interlocked when a person is inside. Events trigger alerts to the person and the supervisor, alarms and stack lights at the zone, and interlocks through the PLC, and every event is recorded with the clip, so near misses are counted and patterned rather than lost. It complements physical guarding, light curtains, and access control by covering the areas and situations those systems do not, and it is the zone-and-proximity counterpart to PPE detection, which checks what a person is wearing rather than where they are.

How is this different from light curtains, laser scanners, and access control?

Those systems are excellent at the point they protect and blind everywhere else. A light curtain guards one plane at one machine opening; a laser scanner covers a fixed area at floor level; access control knows who badged through a door and nothing about who followed them. Vision zones are drawn anywhere a camera sees, cover large and irregular areas like a crane swing radius or a truck apron, distinguish a person from a pallet, and understand combinations, a person in a lane is fine and a person in a lane with a forklift approaching is not. They also work on the sites that have no fixed guarding at all, construction, yards, ports, and outdoor plants. For machine safety functions with a required performance level, the safety-rated device stays in place; vision adds the layer that catches the bypass, the reach-over, and the person who walked in from the side.

How does this handle worker privacy?

Zone monitoring is about position and situation, not identity, and deployments are built that way. Models detect people as people, not as individuals; faces can be blurred at the edge before any frame is stored; clips are retained by your policy and used for safety review; and reporting is by zone, shift, and contractor rather than by named worker unless your program chooses otherwise. Most sites introduce the system with the workforce and the safety committee, and the framing that holds up is that the system warns the person in the zone in the moment, and the near-miss data goes to fixing the lane, the cell, or the procedure. Roboflow supplies the controls; your site sets the policy.

Can it integrate with our safety systems, PLCs, and access control?

Yes. Roboflow Inference (opens in a new tab) runs on an edge device at the site and exposes a standard API and common industrial protocols, so zone events, states, and clips flow into your existing systems: PLCs and safety controllers from Allen-Bradley, Siemens, and Pilz for interlocks and slow-downs, forklift and AGV fleet systems for proximity alerts, access control and visitor systems, EHS and incident management platforms, stack lights, horns, and wearable alerts, and messaging into Slack, Microsoft Teams, radio, and SMS, through REST, MQTT, OPC UA, discrete I/O, and webhooks. PLC-level integration stops or slows the equipment when a person enters the zone, and every event carries camera, zone, rule, timestamp, object classes, and the clip, with a full record behind every alert and every near miss for OSHA and internal review.

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