Page 16 - Security Today, March 2020

All About the Data How video and audio analytics deliver an intelligent advantage
By Joe Morgan
When you consider today’s smartphones, the phone part is almost ancillary. It’s re- ally the apps and the advanced optics that drive the purchase. The same is true of today’s intelligent video surveillance cam- eras. Advanced optics are a given. The differentiator is what you can do with that image or data and what actionable information you can glean from processing it.
We Have Come a Long Way
We have come a long way from the early days of video analytics. Back then, overblown promises often fell short and delivered underwhelming results. Fast forward to today where advanced algorithms can reliably extract and process a wealth of usable data from video images. Some sophisticated algorithms can identify the molecular makeup of venting plumes at oil refiner- ies or pinpoint an overheating transformer at a power substa-
tion. There are algorithms designed to trigger alerts based on anomalous behavior patterns like someone walking the wrong way on an exit ramp.
The enormous progress being achieved is largely due to ad- vanced application development, greater processing power em- bedded in-camera and instantaneous connectivity to supercom- puting power in the cloud to filter and analyze the collected data and direct a response in milliseconds.
What Does This Mean for
Perimeter Security?
Perimeter security is all about situational awareness. Who or what is out there, and does that pose a threat? The more we know, the faster we know, the sooner we can mitigate the risk. Cameras gen- erally capture a huge amount of footage, too much for a human to process in a timely manner. Video analytics can quickly whittle down this vast collection of pixels to just the relevant information
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PERIMETER SECURITY
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