Since the mid-1990’s, when a variety of technologies began converging, it became clear that digital video was going to change the face of security:
- Solid state imagers were getting better and better, and less expensive.
- Video compression was making huge strides. You could even send video over a phone line back then!
- Hard drives were storing more and more video in leaps and bounds.
- And of course, Ethernet and the Internet were started to change everything.
Studying these trends, it looked fairly obvious that video was going to become far more useful and more powerful than ever before.
I’ve always tried to simplify complex changes to help see where things were going. So, in the mid-1990’s, I mapped out three major phases that these changes would go through:
1. Digital Video Recording – the shift from VCRs to DVRs
2. Networked Video Systems – the shift from analog cameras to IP cameras
3. Intelligent Video – the shift from dumb video to smart video
When guessing and forecasting where markets and technologies are headed, the most interesting question to always ask is: Where is the value? That will reveal the biggest driver for change.
In the case of video: It shows you what is happening and what happened. This provides significantly more information than other alarm sensors ever could. Seeing helps you provide better protection for people and their property.
Then, what would happen if you could extract information from the video automatically? What if you didn’t need someone looking at a monitor to watch what was going on?
This is how Video Analytics increases the value of video. And this is why the last of the three above phases will end up being the biggest. When all that valuable information locked in the video files can be freed, you change the way video can be used. You can share that information with other systems, and people around the world can respond immediately.
I haven’t seen any blogs investigating Video Analytics in depth. There are a lot of misunderstandings and some bad information, which is common with any new technology. And big changes require looking at things in different ways than before.
So, I hope this blog helps you learn how to take advantage of this new technology shift, and avoid the pitfalls. There is no question about the impact Video Analytics will have. How will it change the video system of today? That’s one of the interesting questions this blog will be exploring.
