Video analytics: A powerful tool for proactive monitoring – but not all video analytics are equal!
Over the past decade, video surveillance has changed; where it used to be a way of reviewing a crime, it has now become an essential tool for real-time crime prevention. The driver of this change has been the development and adoption of video analytics, a powerful tool that has allowed OmniVision to move from traditional reactive surveillance methods to much more effective proactive monitoring.
In practice, proactive monitoring is made possible by empowering your camera to do detection. The key to providing a good service, however, lies in the technology deployed.
Traditionally, Video motion detection (VMD) was the basic means used by these cameras to detect activity. It relies on detecting pixel changes from one frame to the next. If enough pixels change beyond a certain threshold the camera triggers a motion detection alarm. These days, this basic level of video analytics is not considered ‘smart’, and certainly can’t hold a candle to systems enabled with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). And this is the important point. Video analytics performance varies drastically, from terrible to terrific, depending what type of video analytics one is talking about. Basic VMD is not smart enough to distinguish between the movement of a person and that of a bush or tree blowing about in the wind, or shadows moving along the ground and this can result in thousands of false alarms. Exceedingly high numbers of false alarms makes it difficult to monitor cameras effectively.
Because of the limitations of the original VMD analytics, AI or ‘smart’ analytics were developed to improve detection accuracy and classification capabilities. AI analytics achieve this by applying ‘learning’ or ‘training’ to their algorithms so that cameras can positively identify objects such as people or vehicles and ignore the movement of shadows, branches and animals.
AI analytics can be performed by cameras, recorders, servers or through a cloud service. OmniVision makes use of all of these, applying the most suitable on a site-by-site basis, to provide our clients with the highest level of AI human-detection analytic monitoring possible. To take advantage of this cutting-edge technology to improve the security of your home or business please contact us today.
