by Brian Baker

Okay, I admit, I put that in the headline because it is a headline. The name of this Iceland volcano is also a tongue twister of a word that no one with English as a first language could ever imagine being created from the letters of a Latin-based alphabet. It is, however, entrenched in my mind for a long time to come, even if I will never be able to pronounce it properly.

As I write this, I should be just getting back from Europe meetings with customers and my team that is based there.  I make this trip from Washington, DC about once every 6-8 weeks.  This time, however, the ash cloud that closed European air space also froze my travel plans.

At some point over the weekend of Apr 18-19, my common sense overcame my hopes that the flight ban would be lifted and I would get out on schedule with a Sunday departure. The more I read and followed the television news stories, the more I realized even if United could get me to London, there was no guarantee Lufthansa would be able to get me to the rest of my destinations. Ultimately both ended up cancelling my flights and I stayed home.

The skies have since reopened and, provided Eyjafjallajökull cooperates, I will be back to Europe beginning May 8th to attend the IFSEC global security trade show in Birmingham, UK. I am looking forward to this show. It is usually a pretty good one and worth attending – even if my wife gets left home alone every year with our kids on Mother’s day.

ObjectVideo will have at least six partners exhibiting at this show in either their own or shared stands. These partners include: Synectics, SeeTec, Canon, Genetec, Brickcom and SAE. Two of those partners, Europe-based Synectics and SeeTec, released their OV-enabled products in Q1 2010. It will be good to see them on display.

Additionally, I have been invited to participate on a panel: “Dataveillance – The New Breed of Surveillance” in the Hall 4 theatre from 13:45 – 14:15 on Tuesday, May 11th.

See you there.

by Gary Myers

Earlier this year, ObjectVideo released an updated OV Ready specification and the corresponding OV Ready reference application (which now includes an ‘event push’ functionality) to our partners to incorporate onto their devices. In addition, we provided the 1.0 version of our new web UIs, which we call the ObjectVideo management console.

For those who are unfamiliar with OV Ready, it is an ObjectVideo program that constitutes a protocol specification, reference code and compliance tools to allow interoperability between various devices and applications with respect to video analytics operations and alerting. More detailed info is provided on our website.

Even though that one-sentence summary is quite a mouthful, think of HTTP as an analogy. At a basic level, it is a protocol that specifies how web browsers and web servers can talk. It doesn’t matter if you are using Firefox or Chrome or IE, you can still talk to IIS or Apache. OV Ready is similar except the focus is on ObjectVideo OnBoard configuration, rule management and event output. We want to make sure all ObjectVideo-enabled devices (cameras, encoders, servers, etc.) can be used by a wide variety of management applications (VMS, PSIMs, etc.) regardless of type or brand.

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by Bob Cutting

ISC West asked ObjectVideo to participate in a panel discussion on the topic of where video analytics will be in the next 10 years.  Past events hosting such a discussion have yielded a somewhat “same old, same old” outcome.  But I thought the discussion at ISC resulted in a much more productive outlook to where video analytics is heading with respect to analytics technology and real world solutions for end users. 

 My key takeaway was a very consistent message from the panel on the age-old question of “where analytics?”—referring to whether we will see more analytics on the edge or on a server.  We all answered in our own way, but as I was listening to all the responses, I realized we were all saying the same thing.  What finally came out is that the question is typically only answered half-way.  People focus more on real-time video processing for event generation.  But there’s a growing solution focus on using those events or underlying metadata in more advanced ways, either for forensic searching or for correlation to other sensor outputs and data streams (POS, ATM, access control…)

So while it’s hard to argue against using edge devices with embedded analytics for video analytic processing and real-time event and data generation, there is a growing solution based on leveraging that data across multiple cameras and locations for advanced business analysis and innovative detection scenarios using multiple data inputs that require back-end, server-based systems to manage the data correlation and detection/search policies.  We’re seeing this exact trend in the market, and these future solutions further justify the value that can be extracted from video analytic technology.

by David McGuinness, Gary Myers and Edward Troha

Optimism. It was encouraging to hear manufacturers, integrators, a few end-users/customers and even industry analysts talking about positive plans and expectations for the year.  The adoption rate for IP solutions is gaining speed.  Although 2009 was a year of recession, IP video still grew in the 20-25% range and the promotion of IP was clearly the headline from big traditional players such as Pelco and Tyco.  Major manufacturers spoke about more new IP and analytics-enabled products in the 2010 pipeline.  Good for our industry.

Walking around, it is always interesting to see what companies are doing to draw people into their booths. Outside of the obvious, there was a car giveaway, a “game-show” which faced off attendees to see who could install an alarm panel first, former NFL players signing autographs, a Kindle giveaway, and quite a few soon-to-be-released iPad giveaways. Overall, the traffic at the show seemed to be pretty good and these approaches did draw in the people for at least a look-see. It was easy to get sucked into the booth run by a local company (non-industry) that was doing golf club fitting. They had a golf net and launch monitor with lots of clubs to try out… a certain OV golf nut came very close to going home with a new driver!

Even though there were fewer exhibitors this year, ISC West was as busy as ever.  Thinking Friday would be quiet all day, it turned out traffic didn’t thin until about 12:30.  Keeping with the ”intelligent ingredient” theme, ObjectVideo demos of several varieties were hosted by a number of solution partners, including Pelco, Genetec and DIGIOP.  In addition, it’s encouraging to see the growing opportunities the combination of ObjectVideo and Intel technologies brings to the security and business intelligence markets.  Analytics is not the solution, it just helps to bring much greater value to the solution.