Page 46 - Security Today, August 2017

Think About the Future Surveillance used to protect people, places and assets
BIy Rod Coles
t has now been over 20 years since the first IP Camera was re- leased by Axis Communications back in 1996. Axis originally developed the system to monitor the sea for oil spills. It saved their customers from having to take two flights a day. Today, this method of video delivery is the norm; digital cameras are an ev-
eryday part of life, delivering daily cat videos to Facebook as well as monitoring our businesses and homes for security.
Video is a natural choice for security because as humans, we use our eyes more than any of our other senses. We see CCTV cameras everywhere, so why are the majority of alarm systems not video- enabled? If video is so natural, why is it not being used more in the alarm monitoring industry? Most cameras you see around a building are connected to a NVR/DVR within the building itself, or just re- cording without anyone watching.
Protect Your Assets
Businesses that use video surveillance to protect their assets, such as car lots, can find it quite valuable, but it’s not realistic in most cases for someone to watch the feed 24/7. Video surveillance is often com- bined with other detection methods, such as a perimeter breach or motion detectors, which raise an alarm within automation software. The alarm is brought to an operator, and they decide what to do based on what they observe. The problem with this approach is that it can be error-prone—from detecting the breach, having the operator make a judgement call about what they see, how long they continue to watch, and how far they go back and watch.
The big disruptor to this problem is video analytics. Video ana-
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lytics is becoming commonplace for showing changes that may be happening within a picture to enhance and help an operator see movement. The current challenge with analytics is building context around the potential intrusion: is the movement a human or just a stray dog or cat? Is someone taking a short cut or are they loitering with intent? As analytics become more powerful, the decision about whether to raise an alarm for a human to see or not can be made by the software. This removes error-prone human decision-making, and begins to make this kind of technology more useable in a traditional central station. Potentially, it could even replace traditional move- ment detectors.
One company that has gone further than any other with providing video in the traditional central station is I-View Now. I-View Now provides both live video and event based clips to show the operator what happened. The event based clips have pre-alarm which provides video from prior to a security event, the event itself, and immediately post-event. A typical clip is 15 seconds in length, which gives the operator a very focused view of what is happening, making it much easier for them to decide whether to progress the alarm or not. The I-View Now system uses traditional methods of security system sig- nals, such as a PIR, and video analytics signals to generate alarms.
“Soon all video systems will have video analytics behind them,” I-View Now’s founder, Larry Folsom said. “It’s the future of our industry.”
This move to analytics is becoming possible because the pro- cessing power of equipment like cameras and servers is growing exponentially. This allows more processing power on the “Edge.”
IP VIDEO SURVEILLANCE
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