Surveillance today is all pervasive, cutting across various industries. Be it for access control, traffic enforcement or evidence recording, cameras are seen everywhere.
The associated technology is transitioning from stand-alone, analogue video output to networked and digital video, revolutionising the manner in which video information is analysed, archived, distributed, and managed.
In addition to the technological advancements, recent geopolitical events have caused an increased global focus on physical security.
Furthermore, the commoditisation of video hardware has put downward pressure on equipment prices, further facilitating the proliferation of installed units. These factors, combined with the shift to networked, digital video solutions, have created exponential growth in the creation of raw, digital video data.
This growing mass of raw video data is putting increasing pressure on conventional video monitoring and analysis processes that are labour intensive, inefficient and costly.
Consequently, there is an emerging market need for scalable technology solutions that can alleviate the growing labour cost associated with video monitoring and increase the overall efficiency and accuracy of video surveillance.
Manpower intensive
Most video surveillance installations have a large number of cameras with central control rooms for manually viewing the camera feeds.
As is evident, the task is highly manpower intensive, error-prone and not easily scalable. In addition a huge amount of video footage has to be stored, of which only a small amount of data may be useful.
There is a need to reduce the manual inspection and verification to improve effectiveness – and this is where intelligent video surveillance systems will play a role.
Real-time and automatic event and alarm notification
An intelligent video surveillance system is a networked and distributed IP-based video surveillance system with video analytics algorithms and interface to external sensors
It has the intelligence to provide real-time and automatic event and alarm notifications along with techniques for optimising storage and network bandwidth and advanced management features on an open architecture.
The intelligent video surveillance system should require less manual supervision and provides the ability to monitor and take action from anywhere, anyhow and anytime.
However, deployment is limited because of the exorbitant cost of the solution (both in terms of licensing and processing requirements) and the effectiveness of the video analytic algorithms themselves in solving real-world dynamic situations.
Key concerns
Some of the key concerns include lack of regulation, standards, common operating specifications and performance evaluation.
Every organisation decides what is best for them in the absence of a regulatory body which defines specifications. This could result in a compromise in terms of cost, quality of equipments, and the scalability and security against short-term benefits.
Embracing an international security standard is necessary for scalability, preventing vendor lock-in and information exchange. Compliance to interoperability standards like ONVIF and PSIA is a good step in this direction.
Challenge to integrators
System integrators also face a huge challenge in “meeting often unreal expectations” of the customers. Some typical problems faced are accuracy and false alarms.
For instance, let’s consider the case of the airport security officer who would like to protect the boundary of the airport, and will set up a rule for detecting perimeter violation along the boundary.
Now, the system needs to generate an event only when there’s an actual breach. However there could be cases when a person is close to the boundary wall or if his shadow crosses the actual boundary, leading to false alarms.
Such false alarms cause greater discomfort to the security staff and the faith in the system begins to decline. This problem has to be solved by a combination of installation, commissioning/calibration, training and feedback.
Incident prevention
Today, the questions are not related to “why video analytics”; they are more on the lines of “will this work for me?” or “what can we do to prevent such incidents again?”
The focus will shift more and more from “hindsight” and “after-incident” analysis to “real-time visual alarms” and indications for “incident prevention”.
A fully automated system will not work under all circumstances and a semi-automated system that can optimise operational issues and at the same time alert the security personnel almost as the incident happens is the need of the hour.
Effective video surveillance remains a difficult task despite much technological advancement in this area.
A few of the attributes that must be taken into account while designing and building the intelligent surveillance system include adaptation to various conditions, robustness, ease of use and visualisation for operators, tradeoff between accuracy versus efficiency and more importantly India specific challenges.
Though intelligent video surveillance solutions face a number of challenges, they’re here to stay and make our lives more secure. The systems will only get better with time!
The physical access control market is moving fast. Find out where you stand with the latest edition of IFSEC Insider's comprehensive 2022 State of Physical Access Control trend report, covering all the latest developments within the market. We assess the current technology in use, upgrade plans and challenges, and major trends on the horizon after receiving the views of over 1000 security, facilities and IT professionals.
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