I ran across the following article from John Honovich at his IPVideoMarket.info web site, which is chock full of valuable information about video surveillance:

http://ipvideomarket.info/report/do_video_analytics_work

I highly recommend John’s site.

In this article he raised his concern about the gap in perception between manufacturers of video analytics equipment and the users. Integrators who have tried using analytics products often say it doesn’t work, while all the manufacturers that John talked to said their technology does.

How can this be?

John writes:

Manufacturers generally have a significantly lower standard for determining what works than customers or integrators.  This is not an accident yet it is generally not an issue of malice.  Most manufactures, especially at the senior management level, possess little domain knowledge, resulting in routine underestimation of the needs of their customers.

This is certainly true, and it is a big factor. Many video analytics companies have come from out of University labs or from Computer Vision developers. They saw the security industry as a great place for their technology, but had no real experience in what security professionals have to face in the real world.

As John points out there is also a gap between what a new technology is capable of. When people see a breakthrough, the imagination can immediately jump to Star Trek tricorders and dylithium crystals.

However, I think there is another very big factor at play in this case. It has to do with calibration and tuning.

The best of the Video Analytics companies have tried to simplify this process and make it as straightforward and repeatable as possible. Only VideoIQ has eliminated the need for calibration and tuning, while providing accurate detection. As a result, we’ve seen a much smaller gap from our customers. Our end users are generally surprised at how well the technology detects. They, of course, hope we continue to improve, but rather than being disappointed they seem to be pleasantly surprised.

Here is what I think is happening: Manufacturers are familiar with their technology and their products, so they have learned how to tune and calibrate their systems to make them work well. However, integrators and installers, even after training, will never know how to program their product as well as the engineer who designed it.

I was talking to an engineer, at our VideoIQ booth at a trade show, who ran tests at Cisco when they were evaluating the leading video analytics technologies. He no longer works there now, but he told me about one of the products they thought was the most promising. He said it worked great.

I asked him why they hadn’t adopted the products into the Cisco line, if they worked so well. He said:

“When the head engineer installed the products, they just plain worked. It was remarkable. He knew exactly how to set it up. But, even after our engineers were trained how to calibrate and tune the system, we could never get it to work reliably. Only the head engineer could make it work.”

In other words, a big part of this perception gap comes because manufacturers know how well their products act when installed properly. That’s their perception and that’s what they mean when they say it works. But integrators see only how well the systems work when they try to install them.

What matters is not how accurate and reliable a technology is when a trained specialist installs it – but how well it performs when any video installer puts it in.

That’s an important gap to keep in mind.