“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?”
- Edward Weston, American Photographer
Your surveillance system constantly records massive amounts of videos. Many suspicious events go unnoticed as the video footage cannot be monitored all the time efficiently. The conventional practice of a security guard sitting in a booth watching the security camera feed live, hoping to catch suspicious activity is not efficient. This model relies on having a person watching and reviewing all your video, which is not practical as different security guards may have differing levels of focus or different ideas of suspicious activity.
Video analytics technology was created to meet this need. After all, your surveillance system is only as useful as the incidents you can capture and watch.
What is Video Analytics?
Video Analytics or Video Content Analysis is the capability of monitoring and analysing video streams in near real-time by using software and mathematical algorithms. The software can also share insights gained from historical data. It can identify trends and patterns which can help in making smarter, better decisions.
Deploying video analytics software brings in efficiency while reducing the workload on the security staff. It helps to reap the full value of the surveillance system by making the IP camera system more intelligent in its work.
Centre & Edge Analytic Solutions
Video analytics software can be installed in any of the two places – at the centre or the edge.
Centre would mean the servers or the central monitoring station. Edge would mean the IP cameras or the video encoder.
The central solutions for real-time processing require high network bandwidth and storage requirement. They also require high-end servers as they are required to process huge amounts of data. Central solutions are better for scrutinizing pre-recorded videos as they can be searched many times with different parameters. Companies who wish to upgrade their surveillance system by installing video analytics to some of their existing cameras will find central solutions cost-effective.
Edge solutions are the latest generation of video analytics software. They don’t need dedicated analytics servers as the uncompressed video feed at the camera or the video encoder are analysed directly. This makes it more cost-effective. It is preferable for customers with limited bandwidth. Edge solutions are ideal to track live analytics.
How to implement?
Video analytics software can be bought like any other 3rd party software. The inbuilt software and the third-party software essentially do the same thing as far as monitoring the videos and alerting is concerned. However, each video analytics solution might work a bit differently depending on the manufacturer and application. Parameters to be set during the configuration are, the suspicious activity the software is looking for, alert notification system based on the search criteria etc. needs to be set up.
Learn about salient features of the video analytics software and different ways to employ it in your business in our upcoming blog.
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