Blog Date: 3/19/2012
Author: Ray Coulombe

The industry is getting smarter in realizing that the information captured on video equipment may be useful in non-traditional security or non-security applications, including retail assessments, crowd patterns, patient care and monitoring, employee behavior, operations assessment, litigation mitigation and more. Assuming any of these are conducted within legally accepted boundaries, the net effect is to deliver enhanced business-related ROI from the security department. Of course, this presumes that the information useful and relevant, and that security people and their IT and business counterparts are able to work together to connect the dots.
One proven technology, well on its way to becoming mainstream, is pure analytic-based search. Software such as Agent Vi’s Vi-Search, Axxon’s Forensic Search, 3VR’s Video Intelligence Platform (VIP), and IntelliVision’s IntelliSearch, analyzes video streams, generates metadata describing the scene content, and allows for later retrieval and analysis of the video through automated search within the stored metadata.
A different approach uses basic scene analysis to separate what is moving from what is not (background) and to display only the motion parts. Then, only the dynamic portions of the video are strung together to create the summary. This is the approach of both IntelliVision’s Video Summary and BriefCam’s Video Synopsis. Both products are available for either standalone platform or OEM integration.
These technologies that apply intelligence at the micro level of individual anomalies using analytics, and at the macro level of stitching together or combining selected video frames, really can help relieve the tedium and increase the efficiency of video review. It would be interesting to see, however, if these approaches could be combined to allow the science of analytics to be applied to the time-compressed scene for even more effective search and identification.
Link to Complete Article as it appeared in Security Technology Executive Magazine

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