Page 18 - Security Today, May 2018

Beyond the Basics
Understanding the analytics behind the networked security camera
BAy Paul Kong
security camera is much more than a security cam- era when it’s part of an analytics infrastructure that serves completely new goals, advancing the organiza- tion and management of businesses and even entire cities. Many end users are surprised at how much data
can be mined from an innocuous camera on the ceiling or on the street corner.
Just as computers and VMS continue to get “smarter,” so too are the cameras themselves, evolving their capabilities to see beyond the pixels they capture. Analytics on the edge is nothing new, and most respectable security cameras have a variety of ways to detect motion and basic behaviors of objects in the frame. They can detect loitering, direction of travel and can specify zones to pay attention to.
The latest cameras also detect sound events and can warn users of gunshots, screams, explosions, and glass breaks. These are all very valuable from a security standpoint and will continue to evolve in the coming years. What many don’t realize is that the ability to com- pletely customize a camera to become a business or city management analysis tool is also making great strides.
Giving Cameras a New Job
Basic edge analytics for security are typically built-in to today’s se- curity cameras. Going beyond security, there are a number of spe-
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cialty analytics such as license plate recognition (LPR), traffic, people counting, and heat maps that can be made available to provide new levels of business intelligence and city management. Buying a camera that is purpose-built for business analytics or LPR is possible, but not always practical.
What if you want your LPR camera to also count people? The answer is to let end users choose the analytics they require from a collection of best-of-breed third-party developers. This has the ben- efit of reducing the material cost of manufacturing specialty cameras and also simplifies the installation and future upgrade potential. Ba- sically, we want to design a camera for all seasons where users can install custom analytics applications as simply as one installs an app on a smartphone.
These applications have access to the raw video coming from the sensor and can analyze it onboard of the camera. At Hanwha, we call this capability the Hanwha Open Platform and it is a core fea- ture of our Wisenet X and P series cameras. Hanwha engineers have purposefully reserved space in our Wisenet 5 chipset to allow open platform applications from third parties to be installed as required by the end user. Not only does it unlock powerful new tools and features, it also enables customers to pay for only the analytics they need, when they need them.
This capability, while not exactly new, is seeing rapid adoption
CAMERA SOLUTIONS
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