There are companies that sell what they call video analytics that work they way you describe: They identify a person by a vertical object and a car as a horizontal object. These technologies will always give you very poor performance.

VideoIQ’s technology does not work this way. We use the overall appearance of the object and look for a lot of distinguishing features to recognize what a person looks like or a vehicle looks like.

For example, with a technology that identifies people as a vertical group of pixels, what happens when they walk behind a desk or a park bench and the camera can’t see their legs? Their technology will not be able to recognize them as people anymore. This is why some of these technologies don’t work well indoors, where people are often occluded and blocked by desks and furniture.

VideoIQ’s technology doesn’t use this approach, but recognizes what people look like by a number of distinguishing features that are unique to people. If you go to our web site, http://www.videoiq.com, you will see a video clip of a person behind a blowing tree branch. We do not false alarm on the moving branch, and can still detect the person behind it. This would never work if our technology was only recognizing vertical groups of pixels.

Now, to your question about crawling people. We do not include crawling people in our template of people. So, if a person is crawling, they won’t be detected as human. We plan to add a template for crawling people in the future, but have not seen much demand for it yet and we have a long list of other things that people tell us is more important. So, it is low on priority.

If you have a very high security, high risk site you want to protect and need to catch even people crawling, then we suggest you use the “suspicious object” alarm, which as you say puts yellow boxes around them. That works fine. It will also detect animals and sometimes will trigger on moving tree branches from time to time. So, you will get more false alarms, but you won’t miss anything this way.

If you need more assistance with this, feel free to write me directly or you can contact VideoIQ’s tech support.

I hope this helps answer your questions.

Thanks.

Doug.