Issue link: https://securitytechnologyexecutive.epubxp.com/i/530736
30 SECURITY TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE • May/June 2015 www.SecurityInfoWatch.com I VIDEO ANALYTICS n the movies, the bad guys are somehow always able to slip past the guards watching hundreds of security cameras. And no won- der. Who could watch video feeds of hun- dreds of empty hallways for hours on end without getting bored and distracted? That's why the security community has put such an emphasis on video analytics, letting computers monitor the video feeds and send an alert if they see anything worth investigating. But video analytics hasn't always been up to the task. First generation video analytics was lim- ited to watching for changes in individual pixels, or perhaps a significant portion of the pixels. If a camera was outdoors, trees waving in the wind or even clouds moving in front of the sun might trigger a false alarm. Most of the research and development in video analytics has therefore gone into reducing the number of false alarms. One way they've done this is to program the ana- lytics to view the changes as objects rather than pixels: That's just a rabbit, that's rain, that's snow, that's a spider making a web on the front of the camera. The technology is continuously improv- ing the accuracy of categorizing what the camera is observing according to size, shape, aspect ratio, speed, motion behavior, and color among other parameters. That first generation of video analytics has evolved in two ways: In-camera or edge analytics, where the specialized camera has the intelligence to interpret what it sees, are getting much more sophisticated at a very low price point, some- times to the extent of being bundled with the The Evolution of Video Analytics Advanced technology is not just for alarms and forensics