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Video Content Analysis: Look Smart

Video content analysis (AKA video analytics) is getting better all the time, but it's still new enough that buyers should proceed with eyes wide open

September 07, 2007 — CSO — Rick Santoro, who’s in charge of security for Trump Entertainment Resorts in Atlantic City, N.J., would seem the ideal candidate for using video content analysis—that is, technology that helps organizations draw intelligence from their surveillance video. Hotel and casino operators like Santoro’s company are known for having cutting-edge surveillance, the better to prevent loss and fraud on their high-stakes gambling floors.

Yet Santoro is taking a cautious approach. He’s only now testing systems from several vendors and integrators that could help his security group monitor places like storage facilities, hotel lobbies, parking garages and event venues for the $1 billion company. But he doesn’t think analytics tools are good enough to capture, real-time, the kind of sleight-of-hand movements his group is watching for on casino floors. Instead, Santoro is looking to find ROI with basic applications—such as setting up cameras in liquor storage areas so that they record only when motion is detected. With an emerging technology like video analytics, he says, proceeding slowly is smart.

“The longer we wait and research and look, the better the technology that we’re seeing is, and also the cheaper and more reliable it is,” says Santoro, whose full title is executive vice president of asset protection and risk management. “Five years ago was light-years behind the technology that’s around today.”

That’s one statement that everyone seems to agree with. Video analytics has come a long way from the hyped-up, gee-whiz technology of a few years ago that promised way more than it could deliver. “A lot of people had bad experiences, especially with the outdoor [analytics tools],” which were expensive, hard to configure and didn’t always work, says Sandra Jones, principal at an eponymous security consultancy that focuses much of its attention on video surveillance. “The pioneers have a lot of arrows in their back, but I have to give them a lot of credit because they were ahead of the technology curve.”

The good news is, the technology has improved enough that organizations, slowly but surely, are finding that analytics tools can help them make sense of all the video they are collecting and even find an ROI—but only if they are careful shoppers. Here’s what to know before you begin.

Tip 1 - Understand the Marketplace

Once, video analytics was largely a software business, with applications residing on central servers or digital video recorders. These applications were (and still are) based on algorithms that monitor for specific events—motion detection, intrusion detection, entry through an exit and so on. Some of the analytics companies are still focused on only the software. For instance, the flagship product for Aimetis is supposed to work on any standard, networked PC.