Start-up Behavioral Recognition Systems made its debut this week with plans to release a video-analytics product that can take any digital-video stream used for surveillance and analyze it for potential threat information.

According to John Frazzini, president of BRS, the firm has invented a way to analyze the content in a digital-video data stream to determine whether the activity in it represents a usual or unexpected event in the context of the surroundings.

"This system watches and learns, to know what’s normal or abnormal, based on patterns of activity," Frazzini says.

The Linux-based software, which is expected to be released in the fall, was developed by the R&D team at BRS. The company, which also refers to itself as BRSLabs, has about 32 employees, mostly scientists and software developers. BRS was founded in 2005, with Ray Davis as its CEO, and has received $20 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

Frazzini says the video-analytics technology is intended to convert images captured by a camera into "machine-readable" output that provides intelligence about the surveillance to generate an alert, if necessary.

"Our alerts plug into the video systems that exist," Frazzini says, adding BRS will also be offering its own management console for video-surveillance alert reporting. The larger goal, though, is to be able to provide alerts that can be integrated into existing physical and logical security systems.