Video Analytics: Real Time Applications and Opportunities

In the past few years, video analytics, also known as video content analysis or intelligent video analytics, has attracted increasing interest from both industry and the academic world. Thanks to the enormous advances made in deep learning, video analytics has introduced the automation of tasks that were once the exclusive purview of humans.

Recent improvements in video analytics have been a game-changer, ranging from applications that count people at events, to automatic license plate recognition, along with other more well-known scenarios such as facial recognition or smart parking.

This kind of technology looks great, but how does it work and how can it benefit your business?

Video analytics — a technology which automatically analyzes a video content in order to detect events objects the system is programmed to look for. The advancements of Artificial intelligence have made a big impact in real-time video analytics, making it more accurate and precise in detecting objects, the motion of objects and even to the scale of detecting the emotion present in a human’s face.

Usually, these systems perform real-time monitoring in which objects, object attributes, movement patterns, or behavior related to the monitored environment are detected. However, video analytics can also be used to analyze historical data to mine insights.

This forensic analysis task can detect trends and patterns that answer business questions such as:

• When customer presence is at its peak in my store and what is their age distribution?
• How many times is a red light run, and what are the specific license plates of the vehicles doing it?

Machine learning and, in particular, the spectacular development of deep learning approaches, has revolutionized video analytics. The use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has made it possible to train video analysis systems that mimic human behavior, resulting in a paradigm shift.

It started with systems based on classic computer vision techniques (e.g. triggering an alert if the camera image gets too dark or changes drastically) and moved to systems capable of identifying specific objects in an image and tracking their path.

Emotyx is an artificially intelligent computer vision platform that is scalable, robust and secure for enterprise grade implementations. As a software layer, it enables enterprises to utilize existing camera infrastructure that meets the requirements.

You can harness actionable insights in real-time from your CCTV cameras to optimize your business workflows, enhance business security and data-driven business intelligence.

Emotyx is built using state of the art computer vision technologies and proprietary Deep Neural Network algorithms.

With advancements in IoT devices and applications, channelizing data toward insight generation has become fairly uncomplicated. For video analytics, artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies are opening better opportunities for businesses to drive value without explicit programming.

These models can be trained with high volumes of video footage to identify, classify, tag, and label specific objects automatically. The algorithmic powers of deep learning models enable businesses to –

• Trigger AI for real-time video analytics
• Channelize video feed into data systems
• Add tags and metadata to identify video content
• Extract actionable insights and analytics for rapid decision making

Built using proprietary computer vision and AI algorithms, Emotyx delivers actionable intelligence from any camera source.

A real-time video analytics system such as Emotyx can closely observe a business’s customers and understand what their needs are. For example, a system having the ability to understand what exactly the shoppers look for in a supermarket by the keen observation of how long they look at it, and what their expression indicates at that specific moment can be used to derive business strategies in positioning products in the supermarket. Such a system can even identify the emotion of a customer when they check out a product.

Moreover, cameras hooked up with video analytics can provide companies with a wealth of information about how the business is being run, what customers do, and what makes them happy. These all come in hand to optimize business. The data is collected according to customer behavior can shape a new marketing strategy as well.

Security

The most obvious benefit of video analytics comes under security. The main advantage of having the real-time streaming of video will help to understand and detect several causes that can affect an organization negatively.

The analysis through video will easily catch up things that a human eye cannot. Video analytics for security is already being used by many governments including Dubai Government who uses the technology for suspect detections and rules violation detections.

Public Monitoring

There are about 500 million surveillance cameras, body cameras of law enforcement and billions of mobile cameras being used. With real-time video recording, which is a powerful technology that monitors and identifies the violation in traffic rules, troubling behaviors of personnel, unusual human actions and other anomalies, this can in advance alert you to any unexpected problems and enable rapid responses to incidents as they emerge.

Real-time video analytics will help with security and public safety organizations that develop comprehensive security, intelligence and investigative capabilities using video. Security-based analytics can also excel at behavior analysis, whereby simply observing and analyzing somebody’s walk and talk, make the system to identify their behavior being suspicious.

Other features such as motion and object detection with the use of video object tracking are already put to use in many places where the system can identify loitering, identification of the suspicious object, crowding, occupancy in places like airports, sports venues where there are lots of behavioral as well as suspiciousness can be notified.

Facial Recognition

Facial recognition identifies a person from a digital image or from a video source by comparing selected facial features from a given image with faces within a database. They are used in several situations both in business and for security assurance. Social media platforms use this technology to tag people automatically, mobile companies use them as face ID to unlock mobile phones and in law enforcement, they are used to identify criminals.

Applications of facial recognition include –

• HR department of organizations to track employee presence
• Emotion detection to understand customer satisfaction in retail markets
• Automated interviews and auditions
• Product recommendation based on gender, age etc.

People Search
People search in video analytics detects a particular person’s presence from a given video or even live video footage. This piece of technology is particularly beneficial for security surveillance systems.

Applications of people search include –

• Suspect detection from live public CCTV feeds
• Person identification from videos and images posted in social media

Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection is helpful to detect anomalies happening in a specific region. For example, detection of fire in factory premises or detection of movement in an entry restricted office space etc. When a deviation happens from the usual activities that happen in a place, the system is able to alert the concerned official, take automated actions such as alerting firefighters in case of a fire detected in a building.

Applications of anomaly detection include –

• Monitoring mechanical processes executions in factory premises
• Identifying unusual activities that need to be alerted to officials
• Automated experiments
• Rules violation detection

Video analytics solutions are invaluable in helping us in our daily tasks. There are a vast number of sectors that can benefit from this technology, especially as the complexity of potential applications has been growing in recent years.

From smart cities, to security controls in hospitals and airports, to people tracking for retail and shopping centers, the field of video analytics enables processes that are simultaneously more effective and less tedious for humans, and less expensive for companies.

Please feel free to talk to our experts today to find out how you can leverage video analytics in your organization in order to automate processes and gain valuable insights to make better decisions.

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