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Intelligent edge analytics

When it comes to video surveillance, the buzz is about IP. Although there are still millions of analogue installations throughout the world, it is a fact that nowadays network cameras are being applied more often in video surveillance projects. And there are good reasons to make the change to IP.

The most obvious advantage is image quality. In today’s video surveillance applications there is an ever increasing demand for more detail, and hence higher resolution for enhanced retrospective analysis. IP video surveillance is about delivering the highest quality of relevant IP video. It means delivering the correct data when you need it, under all circumstances, anywhere, and at the lowest costs and network strain.

Considering this, wouldn’t it be great if your security cameras understand what they see? Your camera system could automatically trigger alarms and alert you when needed. It could also detect relevant information, like moving objects in the scene, and dynamically optimise image processing to ensure perfect exposure of the object of interest at all times. Recordings could be tagged, so that data can be found instantly from hours of stored video. Your camera could even decide to stream only relevant video and therefore reduce network strain. In other words, wouldn’t it be great to add sense and structure to your video material? Intelligent Video Analysis (IVA) from Bosch gives you an intelligent IP video solution that proactively supports you, automatically carrying out tasks that would otherwise need to be done manually by security staff or operators.

No matter how few or how many cameras your video surveillance system uses, monitoring everything effectively presents a serious challenge. After viewing for only 20 minutes, an operator can miss 90% of the activity on a screen. IVA analyses the real-time images continuously to instantly detect suspicious events and alerts you when needed. This helps operators or security personnel to spend more time on other tasks, and respond only to important events. And, since you cannot be everywhere at once, IVA can also alert you via your mobile device if needed.

Setting-up IVA rules is straightforward via the intuitive menu and allows you to specify what event, or combination of events, will trigger an alarm. By smartly combining up to 8 of 15 available IVA rules, complex tasks are made easy and false alarms are reduced to a minimum. Image stabilisation ensures the capture of real movement instead of movement caused by the camera itself. Advanced algorithms enable IVA to intelligently adapt to changes in, for example, lighting and environment. Disturbances caused by rain, snow, clouds, leaves blowing in the wind, can be filtered out to ensure the highest reliability.

Searching through hours of stored video is difficult and time consuming when looking for the correct data. IVA captures data on everything that happens within each monitored scene. Content analysis information, in the form of metadata, is stored alongside the video images and adds sense and structure to it. The metadata contains details on all objects entering or leaving the monitored scene like speed, direction, colour, and more. Analysis of the scene content is not limited to live scenes. Bosch IVA can also provide event recognition during playback of recorded video. You can even find events that were originally not set up as an alert.

Forensic search offers a solution to simply review your archive video using new detection criteria. The metadata describing the specific image details are kept as simple text strings. These are much smaller and easier to search through than the hours of recorded video images. By searching the metadata using smart search criteria you can instantly retrieve the correct data from hours of stored video. Metadata can also be used to deliver irrefutable forensic evidence or to optimise business processes based on, for example, people counting or crowd density information.

Bosch also puts intelligent video analysis at the edge. Every Bosch IVA camera can operate independently without the need for a central analytics server – so no single point of failure. This is called distributed or decentralised intelligence. If one camera or encoder fails, the rest of the system remains at full performance. Expanding the system is therefore also easy. Network strain and storage requirements can be reduced by only streaming what is needed, since the analysis is done in the camera.

With intelligence at the edge, the focus is to enhance system robustness and flexibility while reducing costs. For every IVA camera you can choose a wide variety of advanced IVA alarm rules, ranging from perimeter protection (fence climbing), enforcing health and safety regulations (parking in restricted areas), intelligent tracking of moving objects to securing public spaces (idle object).

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