Page 17 - Security Today, March 2021

“AI presents a perfect solution
to compensate for unmanned environments or those with limited staffing, or the loss of vigilance after looking at a screen too long.”
By Ray Cooke
Applications for Security
For security applications, there are two main areas where camera-based AI will significantly improve and enhance security operations:
1. Identifying alert-worthy events
2. Enhanced Forensic Search Post-event
Traditional video analytics that send alerts or tag motion events such as line crossing, loitering and object left behind are prone to errors and false positives from wind, rain, or people standing in front of the object in question. These pre- vious generation video analytics only see “motion blobs” as opposed to objects with properties that allow them to be classified.
By using AI to detect and identify spe- cific object types like people or vehicles, we can greatly reduce false alarms, while ignoring things like wind, rain, shadows and an errant plastic bag floating by. AI enables an entire new class of analytics, with more sophisticated logic and cus- tomization for precisely what an end user requires.
AI can also help us count objects like people or cars more precisely . This in- cludes the ability to count objects accurate- ly even when they partly “occlude” or pass in front of each other. This is key since it allows use cases like people counting from more sensible camera view angles. This is far beyond today’s video analytics, which require a top-down view to avoid occlusion, and which gives a less useful camera view when you want to see faces.
Beyond event triggers and object clas- sification, it is important to realize how much descriptive metadata an AI-based camera can capture with each frame. And because the metadata is small, it adds very little to the overall bandwidth and storage requirements.
Several defining characteristics of a de- tected object can be captured such as the color of a person’s shirt and pants, length of garment, hat or no hat, glasses or not, handbag or not, and approximate age and gender. The impact on forensic search is profound. Imagine the time it takes to search through 10 hours of video looking
are able to make associations and recog- nize certain objects exponentially faster.
Because an AI model doesn’t under- stand the context of a situation in the same way that people do for many use cases and complex situations, it will be quite some
time before the technology can reliably de- cide and take action autonomously. It can, however, reliably show us events that are likely to be worth human attention, and when appropriate, feed the events to other systems to add more value.
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