Enabling enterprise video surveillance with video analytics

Over the past decade video surveillance has migrated from analog closed circuit television systems with point-to-point connections to modern digital systems that run on IP networks. Enterprise video surveillance systems can scale to hundreds or thousands of cameras spread across geographically dispersed facilities, but this presents bandwidth, processing and storage challenges. The cost to deploy and maintain such systems over their lifetime can be staggering, but new video analytics technology offers a compelling alternative.

Video analytics is the automated analysis of video content for user-defined events of interest. The technology is primarily used for physical security and business intelligence applications. Capabilities range from simple motion detection to sophisticated algorithms for detection of people, vehicles, objects and their behaviors or interactions. The best techniques ignore normal scene changes in a camera view as well as motion due to snow, rain and tree foliage.

Examples of physical security applications include perimeter breach, loitering or removal of an object, while business intelligence applications include measurement of customer traffic and analysis of customer behavior. However, video analytics does much more than optimize safety and security and enable better business decisions — it also reduces the total cost of IP video surveillance system ownership.

IP Video surveillance systems

The major elements of an IP video surveillance system are cameras, recorders, servers and software. Cameras are distributed across monitored locations, while recorders and servers are typically centralized for ease of management. A video management system (VMS) provides unified access to live and recorded video and aggregates hardware from multiple vendors.

New cameras employ MPEG-4 and H.264 compression to provide DVD or HD-resolution video at bit rates between 1M and 12Mbps. It is desirable to consolidate recorders and servers centrally for ease of configuration and maintenance. This video can then be distributed to one or more security/network operations centers and streamed on demand to responders and emergency personnel in the field.

A VMS is employed to provide recording, streaming, switching and multiplexing functionality. It can normalize streaming video from multiple sources into a common format as well as provide recording and playback services. It also functions as a video server by relaying video to multiple endpoints, each with different resolution and bit rate requirements.

VMS functionality increasingly runs as software on enterprise servers instead of on custom embedded hardware. A single server can handle the recording and streaming tasks for 64 or more cameras, with video stored on internal drives or on a storage-area network. Management software typically combines a database server and a Web server, which enables configuration and monitoring over the network and notification to mobile endpoints.
Infrastucture planning

A medium to large deployment can involve hundreds if not thousands of cameras distributed over tens or hundreds of locations. Most security policies require video to be stored for a week to a month, and some require it to be archived for a year or longer. The operational and maintenance costs over the lifetime of such a system can easily exceed the upfront capital expenditure.