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A Guide to Video Analytics: Features and Applications

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the fundamentals of video analytics, how it’s used in different industries to gather insights and automate processes.

Technology that automatically analyzes video content is called video analytics (also known as video content analysis or VCA). They accomplish this by applying algorithms to video processing that perform a particular purpose, such as scanning license plates or recognizing moving objects. They are frequently referred to as intelligent video analytics when artificial intelligence is involved.

Using automated video analytics technology, AI is now sifting the manual monitoring of CCTV footage, such as stream monitoring, intrusion detection, or crowd monitoring. Integrating video analytics into video surveillance systems might help security personnel spot events during lengthy shifts when they must remain vigilant and simultaneously watch several camera feeds.

With real-time traffic jam alerts and systems that monitor customer movement in businesses to boost sales, recent developments in video analytics have entirely transformed the game. Features such as vehicle type classification and vehicle heat map analysis are two well-known applications.

Technology of this nature may look amazing, but how does it operate, and how can it help your company? In this guide, you’ll learn the fundamentals of video analytics, how it’s applied in practice to automate processes and extract insightful data, and what factors to consider when deploying intelligent video analytics programs in your business.

What is intelligent video analytics?

Video analytics’ main goal is to recognize temporal and spatial events in videos. For example, a video analytics solution can spot erratically appearing flames and smoke, violating traffic signs, and suspicious activities.

Also Read: How the Retail Industry is using Video Analytics to Extract Data from CCTV Streams?

The CCTV and video surveillance industries can profit significantly from intelligent video analytics. The capacity of analytics tools to automatically identify potential threats in real-time relieves the tremendous burden off security professionals.

Other advantages are:

Increased time and efficiency

CCTV monitoring operators have a difficult job since they must focus on screens for long periods while remaining alert to any changes they notice. It is widely believed that control room personnel evaluate at least three alerts every minute, and even the slightest change could signify some questionable activity.

Operators invest a lot of time and effort, which reduces their likelihood of performing at their best when an actual event arises when you consider that 95% of these alarms are probably false. Intelligent video analytics lessen the effort of an operator by up to 90%, relieving them of the burden of false alarms and allowing them to concentrate on the real ones.

For quicker and more efficient reactions to security threats, operators are now looking forward to integrating technology. Employees also find this helpful as the loud alarm noise isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Accurate decision-making

Accuracy is crucial when creating algorithms for crime detection since it can make the difference between a crime being prevented and one happening.

When conditions are ideal — when people are not exhausted and can concentrate — humans can precisely detect occurrences. However, most operators must multitask while watching multiple monitors at a single workstation.

Operators receive more detection assistance by including video analytics in their operations processes. Machine learning algorithms can consistently identify real and false alarms for as long as necessary since they don’t get tired or lose attention as humans do.

Constant learning & improvement

A fascinating aspect of AI-powered video analytics is that they continually improve because they constantly learn. This is because machine learning algorithms grow increasingly adept at differentiating between real and fake alerts as you expose them to more video material.

This is fantastic news for businesses that invest in video analytics since it shows that the company isn’t static and improves with time.

Video Management Software

Innovative video analytics techniques are increasingly gaining traction. Before artificial intelligence (AI) development, those using conventional video surveillance systems were among the key adopters. Others were those seeking to automate their processes by implementing disruptive technologies.

A VMS is a piece of software that organizes and saves video from security cameras. A VMS can offer a single interface with search, playback, and export features that enable viewing both live and recorded video from numerous cameras. The majority of VMS programs are made to work with particular kinds of cameras, including IP or CCTV cameras.

Video management solutions must incorporate video analytics capabilities to support manual operators who must watch video streams. These functions include automated notifications or tagging and face and person detection.

Computer Vision Systems

A computer vision system analyzes images using image processing algorithms in multi-step computer vision pipelines to extract information from video data. Computer vision systems can handle complex and commercially relevant tasks such as person or object detection, facial recognition, activity recognition, quality inspection, and more. Cameras or video management systems can provide video input to computer vision systems.

Typical Industry Applications of Video Analytics

Retail

One of the most significant technological advances in recent years has been machine learning and video analytics in the retail industry. Video analytics can help brick-and-mortar stores better understand their consumers’ demographics and behavior and increase ROI. According to a McKinsey report, businesses in the fashion industry that have already incorporated AI into their business models stand to gain a total of 118% more cash flow by 2030. Those that invest more slowly will fall behind and may experience a 23% relative drop. Your retail store’s CCTV cameras can analyze video footage using video analytics software to help you find patterns in consumer behavior and increase in-store sales based on real-time video data.

Related Read: Drive Targeted Marketing in Retail with Video Analytics Insights

Measuring the number of customers entering and leaving a store is a common way to assist in determining high-impact metrics like conversion rates. Security cameras that have already been installed can be used to leverage this strategy, making deployment quick and affordable.

Creating anti-theft systems is another r significant application for video analytics. Face recognition algorithms, for instance, can be trained to identify known shoplifters or to detect someone hiding anything in their backpack in real-time.

Additionally, data gathered from video analytics can be used as training data for machine learning models, which try to tackle more complex problems.

Security

A long-standing security responsibility is video surveillance. Real-time identification of people and cars can be made using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and facial recognition technologies. For example, looking for a suspect in the live and recorded video is feasible, or identifying authorized individuals and allowing access to a secured location.

Another essential role of security systems is crowd management. Modern video analysis tools may improve security in malls, hospitals, stadiums, and airports. These tools can send alerts when a threshold is achieved or exceeded and estimate the number of people present in real time. They can also see the crowd’s movement to spot any inappropriate activity.

Video content analysis systems can be taught to recognize particular occurrences, sometimes with a high level of sophistication. The early detection of flames is one such instance. Or, in the case of airports, to raise the alarm when someone enters a restricted space or moves in the opposite direction of where the passengers are supposed to be moving. Real-time detection of unattended luggage in a public area is another good use case. Algorithms that filter out motion brought on by wind, rain, snow, or animals allow for the robust performance of traditional tasks like intruder detection. Intelligent video analysis is becoming more and more functional in the security space, and this growth will continue in the years to come.

Smart Cities

The development of smart cities has benefited dramatically from video analytics’ use in the transportation sector. If proper traffic management measures are not followed, a rise in traffic, particularly in urban areas, can increase accidents and traffic congestion. In this situation, intelligent video analysis solutions may be crucial. Traffic light control systems and traffic jam monitoring can be done using traffic analysis. Additionally, it can help spot dangerous circumstances in real-time, such as vehicles halted in prohibited areas of the road, people driving against traffic flow, erratically moving cars, and vehicles involved in accidents. These systems are helpful in the event of an accident for gathering data in the case of a lawsuit.

Counting vehicles or separating them into distinct categories, such as cars, trucks, buses, taxis, etc., produce valuable statistics that can be used to learn more about traffic. Speed camera installation enables precise mass-driving management. With the help of real-time searching, automatic number plate recognition can identify vehicles that break the law or a car that has been stolen or used in a crime. An intelligent parking system based on video analytics assists cars in finding an open spot by examining images from security cameras rather than placing sensors in each parking space.

Conclusion

If you look for video analytics solutions, there are a plethora of applications that you may find. From turning your homes into smart homes to catching criminals through video analytics, video analytics companies can customize several use cases accordingly. At Staqu, we have worked with both the public and private sectors. From leading brands to government agencies, our video analytics tool, JARVIS, can provide real-time alerts, several detection use cases, and more. We utilize our optimal in-house software, JARVIS, and user-friendly VMS because we offer customized solutions, ensuring our analysis’s accuracy.