3 Nisan 2008 Perşembe

Agent Vi Unveils “3-for-Free” Video Analytics Promotion


Risk-free Program Allows Organizations to Trial Software on Up to Three Cameras for 90 Days


LAS VEGASApril 2, 2008


Agent Vi, developers of enterprise video analytics software to improve security, business intelligence and operations, today introduced its “3-for-Free” promotion, a program that allows organizations to deploy any three of the company’s award-winning video analytics activity applications through Agent Vi or its channel partners on up to three IP cameras for as long as 90 days.


“This attractive offer allows Agent Vi and our most qualified partners to offer virtually any organization the ability to enjoy, risk-free, the power, flexibility and reliability of our next-generation video analytics software,” said Mark Kolar, vice president, channels for the Americas, Agent Vi. “With no contract, no commitments and no cost, this is truly a unique offer that’s too good not to consider and one we’re proud to be offering in close alignment with a range of highly experienced partners.”


After an organization provides a few details about its enterprise to Agent Vi or one of its partners, a quick follow-up assessment occurs and then installation of the video analytics software takes place on up to three cameras. Generally the installation process will be managed by Agent Vi’s most qualified and trained resellers who have locally trained and accessible engineers. After the trial, those entities that order Agent Vi video analytics on at least 10 additional cameras within their enterprise may maintain the initial three installations free of charge during the term of the license.


Qualified channel partners that offer the ”3-for-Free” promotion to their customers will have access to Agent Vi’s certified product and engineering training, downloadable tutorials, co-marketing programs, lead generation sharing, marketing materials, product installation and support services from Agent Vi and a partner-branded “microsite.” Interested parties can visit the microsite at http://www.3-for-free.com/ or call 800-593-1385 to sign up or get more information.


“This special promotion addresses the needs and desires of our channel partners by furnishing them with a winning solution which is easy to deploy,” explained Kolar. “Video analytics has come of age, and Agent Vi is excited to bring superior products to our partners which allow them to fulfill the promise of delivering the right technology at the right time.”


About Agent Vi’s Video Analytics Solution


Agent Vi’s software makes video analytics feasible, affordable and scalable by giving organizations the freedom to deploy our software on any number of cameras using just one server. This approach employs a new class of video analytics for improved security, business intelligence and operational performance.


The power of Agent Vi’s video analytics is generated from our software’s distributed processing environment. Similar to today's JavaTM-enabled browsers that access hosted applications, Agent Vi's patented technology flashes a lightweight agent where the video exists, either at the camera or encoder, and then communicates video feature changes to hosted behavioral applications; thus implementing an increasing number of behavioral and activity applications. The result of this unique architecture is dramatically lower installation and operational costs with minimized hardware and network bandwidth environments.


Agent Vi, working with the industry’s leading security cameras, provides a comprehensive library of motion, non-motion and behavioral activity applications. With Agent Vi, customers can rapidly add new rules and detection capabilities to one or all cameras within a network. Using IP-based systems, all cameras can be easily and quickly updated from a single computer. Working as a standalone system or integrated with existing closed circuit televisions (CCTV) solutions, Agent Vi delivers intelligence under the most adverse conditions, with a combination of CCTV, day/night, thermal imaging and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras. It can also integrate with third-party access control systems to enforce strict access control policies.


About Agent Vi


Agent Vi is an enterprise video analytics software company that delivers solutions for improved security, business intelligence and operations. Deployed in over 25 countries and in thousands cameras and edge devices, our technology seamlessly integrates with existing video equipment and IT infrastructure, making video analytics feasible, affordable and scalable. Founded in 2003, Agent Vi has proven deployments worldwide with customers in retail, airports, rail, transportation, education, critical infrastructure, utility, government, financial institutions and metropolitan markets.

Intelligent Video has a Bright Future

The costs of video analytics are coming down, and the benefits are expanding far beyond security.

Greg McConnell - June 26th, 2007
Assistant Editor

Video analytics has been in the high end market of security projects for several years now. Airports, prisons, military bases, and other large scale facilities have deployed intelligent video with some success over the years. However, as with any new technology, it is taking a while for video analytics to really make its way down to the small and mid-sized projects. It's not “mainstream” yet, which of course begs the question: “How long will it be before video analytics becomes a staple technology?”

Your answer largely depends on who you ask. Some industry insiders will tell you that video analytics is already mainstream because it's already popping up in everyday places such as banks and grocery stores. Others argue that the technology still needs to mature and prices have to come way down before it can turn a profit for most security dealers.

So where is the happy medium? The truth is that the video analytics game is changing at an accelerating pace. Manufacturers are entering the mainstream market with simplified solutions tailored to fit what the small or mid-sized customer needs. No, the mainstream market isn't anywhere close to being saturated; and yes, security dealers should still be cautious about implementing intelligent video solutions as data still comes in regarding the returns on investment. But the trend is undeniable: The solutions are becoming better, the prices are coming down, and video analytics is beginning its move into the mainstream.

“We're really at the very beginning of the crest of the wave,” says Mariann McDonagh, VP of global marketing, Verint. “It's probably going to take the next 3 years or so before video analytics becomes a widely accepted, mainstream video application.” So what will this “wave” look like? How will video analytics be priced for the mainstream market and what real-world problems will it aim to solve? These are the questions addressed in this article.

WHY VIDEO ANALYTICS?

When looking at the critical i nfrastructure market of video analytics, an important function is “intrusion detection.” Large facilities, such as airports, have such expansive perimeters that it's not feasible for a person (or even many people) to monitor the entire perimeter. This is where a camera with video analytics can do a good job of alerting security personnel when a vehicle or person is exiting or entering an area at a time or place that could be suspicious.

However, this is not what video analytics will look like for the mainstream market. In fact, physical security will be just one of many video analytics applications. ”If you look at the mainstream markets in video, the number one and number two purchasers of CCTV equipment are retailers and banking,” says Alan J. Lipton, chief technology officer, ObjectVideo.

In order to provide a variety of useful solutions for retail stores and banks, video analytics will have to be integrated with other systems. For instance, banks could be very interested in knowing when somebody walks up to an ATM but doesn't start a transaction. The camera (with analytics) can tell that a person has walked up to the ATM, but it can't know whether or not a real transaction is taking place unless it has data from the ATM.

“One of the hot applications for us in the retail space is something called return fraud analysis,” says Vidient's McDonagh. “85% of the employee fraud that occurs within the big box retail chain is actually perpetuated by this one type of fraud: Returns that are rung up when there is no customer present in the aisle. So what our particular analytics solution does through its integration with the point of sales system is it knows when there is a return transaction that is logged and there is no customer physically in the aisle.”

In grocery stores, a video analytic that could be handy is “slip and fall.” If the camera sees a person slip and fall in the store, the proper personnel could be alerted immediately to check out the situation.

There also could be energy saving applications for video analytics in the future. For instance, a camera could detect that a room is empty and thus turn off the lights.

And of course, video analytics will aim to give users the ability to search vast amounts of video for specific actions or objects after the fact. An example would be if you had reason to believe that a suspicious red van had been in your parking lot at any time over the past 3 months.

Rather than having somebody watch three months of video, you could have the analytics search the video for red objects that are the approximate size of the van (give or take). This is an area of analytics in which IBM wants to excel. The company continues to add to its toolkit of server-based video analytic solutions, building upon its long-standing expertise in databases.

Smart surveillance solutions with finite parsing of video will be key moving forward, says Bob Angell, senior informatician, retail emerging business opportunities, IBM. “We can put the events in a database of structured content,” he adds.

PRICING FOR MASS
MARKET APPEAL


“Most of the money in video analytics is coming from critical infrastructure—airports, train stations, subway stations, electrical grids, water treatment plants, petrochemical plants, and throw in a few corporate headquarters. That's where the dollars are,” says Steve Goldberg, CEO, Vidient. “Do we think that there's an opportunity in small/medium enterprise and then even moving past that to consumers? Absolutely. That's the Holy Grail for Vidient. That's what our investors are looking for—the mass market.”

It's no big secret that the reason video analytics is not in every bank, store, restaurant, and school today is because the return on investment isn't there yet. But the key word here is “yet.” Things are changing; and for more reasons than meet the eye, prices are coming down.

Steve Birkmeier, director of marketing, Arteco IVS, says that for clients looking to get into basic video analytics, the cost could be about $1,000 per channel. Arteco also has a new dealer program designed to help dealers maximize their return on investment when it comes to the intelligent video market.

Garry Clarke, president, ioimage LLC, agrees that analytics can be as low as $700 to $1,000 per channel. “We're getting to the point where video analytics will go down to the small integrator and the small installer,” he says.

One way that analytics can be used more efficiently and thus drive the price down is with software that can schedule multiple cameras through a single analytics channel, explains Mulli Diamant, vice president of sales for On-Net Surveillance Systems (OnSSI), which has such software running on its network video recorders. Diamant gives the example of a video surveillance system that has 50 cameras, but not all of the cameras need to have analytics all of the time. Depending on the environment and risk factors, those 50 cameras could be scheduled to run through one of the ten analytics channels at different times. This way all 50 cameras are capable of having analytics, but you're only paying for 10 analytics channels. Not only does pricing vary among the manufacturers, but so does the manner in which pricing is done. Some companies charge per channel, whereas others might charge per algorithm or behavior.

SightLogix is pricing video analytics in yet a different way. “The real measure of the cost of analytics should be ‘reliable coverage area per dollar,'” says John Romanowich, CEO, SightLogix. “The end-customer's true cost includes costs of everything from cameras to communication equipment to bandwidth QoS and integration to make it work with other systems, infrastructure costs (e.g. specialized structures such as stabilized mounts) and finally t he cost of managing false and nuisance alarms.”

“The most significant trend or innovation in video analytics is really about ‘platform' more than anything else,” says Alan J. Lipton, chief technology officer, ObjectVideo. “What is really unique is this ability to take analytics and really put it into any single device in the video ecosystem and be able to do some cool stuff with that. So now it's in your camera. It's in your router. It's in your encoder. It's in your DVR or NVR or wherever you need it to be.”

Texas Instruments is one of the many company's with which ObjectVideo is partnering. TI's Da Vinci technology-based DSP's are bringing more capabilities on-chip for surveillance cameras, and thus reducing costs. One of the capabilities that can be programmed is video analytics. Yvonne Cager, video security marketing manager, Texas Instruments, sees this as another way analytics is coming down in price and heading into the mainstream market.

TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

No matter how great any video analytical algorithm is, it can only be as good as the image it's analyzing. These algorithms are essentially analyzing groups of pixels, and if the pixels comprise a distorted image then the analytics won't be very useful.

When indoor cameras are being tried outdoors for analytics without success, it should come as no surprise that if you're not using the camera for its proper application, then the image will suffer and so will the analytics. But getting a great image isn't the end of the story. These images still need to be analyzed.

The next question is where will that computer processing take place? It's commonly done on a server. However, getting all that video from the camera to the server eats up a lot of bandwidth which has its own costs.

Increasingly, video analytics processing is becoming more distributed. Rather than doing all of the processing on the server, the analytics are starting to be done at the camera, the NVR, etc. This can decrease network traffic without sacrificing intelligent video.

Agent Vi is not using the standard approach,” says Gadi Talmon, vice president of business development, Agent Vi. The company's video analytics solution uses a new architecture, called IPoIP (Image Processing over Internet Protocol). It's a distributed approach with some of the analytics done locally at the video encoder and some of it done at the server. With this architecture, Agent Vi aims to retain the strengths of local and server architectures, while minimizing their weaknesses. In summary, video analytics are coming to a store (or bank or school) near you. It's not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Anywhere you see surveillance cameras today is an opportunity for video analytics tomorrow. Most of the applications for video analytics will be outside the realm of physical security, but security dealers who understand the technology will be in a prime position to get the business.

2 Nisan 2008 Çarşamba

Video Content Analysis Moves to the Edge

IMS Research - 28 January 2007

IMS Research’s latest report on video content analysis (VCA) highlights the rapidly growing trend towards embedding VCA algorithms into security devices, such as DVRs, video encoders and network cameras. DSP-based analytics enables these devices to analyse live or recorded video streams to detect predefined suspicious activities, events or behaviour patterns.

IMS Research predicts that in the short term the biggest penetration of VCA will occur within DVRs and video encoders. This will be due to the large installed base of analogue cameras.

Intelligent encoders offer a cost effective way to convert to a networked system and analyse the video at the point of capture. A number of suppliers are already offering network cameras with a full suite of embedded analytics. IMS predicts that in the coming years there will be even greater penetration of VCA as network camera manufacturers increasingly embed low cost, entry level analytics for advanced motion detection or systems health monitoring. IMS Research predicts that shipments of network cameras with embedded VCA will exceed 800,000 units by 2010.

Market research analyst at IMS Research, James McManus commented: “There will be a greater emphasis on moving the intelligence out into the field devices to enable pre-transmission processing and bandwidth preservation. Intelligent edge devices eliminate the need to transmit all captured video to centralised servers for analysis. This is a more cost effective way of implementing VCA than a server-based approach and will lead to far greater uptake of VCA technology”.

If you would like an interview with an expert in this area, please contact James McManus, Market Research Analyst, at james.mcmanus@imsresearch.com or +44 1933 402255.

About IMS Research

IMS Research is a supplier of market research and consultancy services on a wide range of global electronics markets. The company is supported by headquarters in Wellingborough, UK and offices in Austin, Texas and Shanghai, China. IMS Research regularly publishes detailed research on electronic security markets, such as video surveillance, access control, intruder alarms and fire detection and suppression. www.imsresearch.com