Most people understand that surveillance systems are not deployed as a measure to restrict their civil liberties but rather a means to deny criminals the freedom to operate.
With this is mind and calculating, as part of the equation, the increasing demand for security cameras, it is undeniable that the rate at which intelligent software and hardware systems will contribute in the field of surveillance is an undeniable one.
Those of you who may have read ‘1984’ by George Orwell will see through some of the facts relayed in this editorial that the man was in fact onto something much more advanced than humankind could ever have imagined at the time when he wrote the book, or even in 1984.
The advances in the intelligent systems field of technology find its core in the development of heuristic algorithms and/or neural engines. These are simply a combination of mathematical equations and rules that are created and processed in realtime with the aim to learn from itself as it goes along and use a step-by-step and/or a trial-and-error approach when analysing information from video.
Each pixel in an image is statistically analysed and compared to neighbouring pixels in order to form a picture of what is happening in a scene. By adopting this approach it quickly learns which pixels in a scene make up the static or non-changing parts of the scene and can therefore start by triggering for example a alarm on objects that it identifies as non-static or not part of the scene, like a trolley entering a scene and standing at one point for too long or perhaps an object moving from the scene when it is not expected to move.
The intelligent system also learns to recognise and ignore false alarms caused by environmental elements such as rain or variations in light. As much as this type of intelligence is written as software applications, you also find them ported to hardware digital processing chips that are then used in cameras, digital recorders and other video processing devices.
Intelligent video surveillance systems are always capturing logs of events and the related actions which leads to a significant add-on to the stereotypical digital video processing systems that we know in the form of management information. These can now be data mined and become recurring reports that management use as part of an overall decision support system to enhance controls, procedures and general process flow within organisations.
Applications for intelligent video surveillance software are motion and object detection, missing and suspicious object detection, crowd counting/control, aggression detection, object tracking, loitering detection, incorrect direction detection, intruder and perimeter detection and protection to name a few examples.
Whichever way we look at it, intelligent software is here to stay. Having said this, it is extremely important to back these solutions up with competent operators that in combination with the intelligence added to the security system can be more proactive in their approach to monitoring security and operations in all environments.
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