IBM video technology targets security problems

IBM today rolled out security software it says analyzes data from video surveillance cameras to help customers more quickly identify and issue alerts on suspicious events.

Scientific work analyzing digital video has helped IBM develop what it’s calling its Smart Surveillance System (S3) to monitor and analyze events to precisely identify specific types of activity from people and vehicles, says Charles Palmer, CTO of privacy and security at IBM Research. IBM’s S3 technology is now ready for commercial deployment for physical security at airports, retail locations or corporations where video surveillance is needed for specific tasks.

IBM’s S3 technology framework, according to Palmer, is in essence software that makes use of complex math and algorithms designed to search and identify precisely what security managers want to discover through digital video.

IBM says the Digital Video Surveillance systems that make use of the S3 monitoring and search technology early next year will use cameras, digital video recorders, servers, storage systems and network devices from partners that include Panasonic, VectorMAX, NICE, Verint, Insight, Anixter, Cisco, ADT, Bosch, Pelco and Broadware. The software can also integrate information from audio feeds, radar systems and chemical detection units.

The technology could have wide-ranging applications such as vehicle recognition, abandoned bags, people moving through high-security areas, or theft. S3 would analyze events either in stored video or in real-time.

“At airports, they want to define an area of the tarmac, for instance, to tell where a person going out there came from, whether it was from a permitted place or not,” Palmer notes. “In retail locations, stores want to know about fraud. The big innovation is that you’ve had miles of video and now you can do something with it.”

IBM said it will sell S3 in combination with other types of software, security consulting services, systems integration work and computer hardware. Pricing was not announced.