by Paul Brewer

If you ask security directors how they go back into the video archives to search for something abnormal or for a specific event, the answer is almost always, “I don’t.”  Unless they know which camera feed to watch, and have a fairly good idea of the when to start searching in the video, this manual task is just too daunting. 

Video analytics has brought some much needed automation to this problem.  Now if you know where the event of interest occurred and can create a tripwire or other event rule, then all you have to do is to scroll through the alert logs and jump to that point in the video feed.

That’s great as far as it goes, but it’s still pretty limited.

What do users really want?  Based on direct user feedback, they want to be able to search for specific people, vehicles or events across the enterprise video system.  They want to use what they learn from one search to refine the next.  They want to search by example—designating a specific vehicle or person of interest to flag in a database search that might be narrowed by a specific geographic region or time period.  They want to create searches and visualize search results on an intuitive geo-interface.  And, they don’t want to just be limited to the video archives.  Forensic search results need to then become the parameters for real-time rules to find exactly where that white cargo van of interest is right now. 

This is the future of video search and it is what we are demonstrating right now for our sponsors in the Department of Defense.  A recent field exercise allowed ObjectVideo to showcase the ability to visually “fingerprint” cars that were flagged by HUMINT (human intelligence) and pick them out of the video feeds to present ultra high resolution snapshots to the “Battle Captain.” 

This was not a carefully controlled lab experiment with rigidly scripted scenarios with a small set of total vehicles.  This was a real needle-in-the-haystack exercise with a very small number of “opposition” vehicles operating on crowded public streets.  These vehicles were controlled by an opposition commander with purposes known only to him.

Besides being a great chance to show off what we can currently do with this technology, it was a priceless opportunity to learn from users and hone some new interface and workflow ideas.  When it comes to video search, the best days are still ahead, and possibly not as far off as you might think.

by Gary Myers

Since my post last week, I’ve received a number of questions and comments so I thought I’d address them as a post (hopefully for everyone’s benefit.)

As Steve Mitchell points out, the end-user definitely has an impact on the performance of the analytics and training is needed.  He drew the analogy last week about pilots and airplanes.  Stretching this pilot/plane analogy a bit, the end-users are the pilots and OV is a part of the airplane (with the whole plane being the end product delivered to market by our partners.)   OV builds a component that works in many different planes and our responsibility is to make sure it performs in a wide variety of settings.  Our OEM partners deliver the complete plane, which includes working with the pilots (users) to understand how to operate the plane (product) most effectively.

As part of the release process, we qualify our software in several ways:

• Science testing to validate the newest release is at least as good, if not better, than prior releases. These automated tests utilize thousands of hours of videos and corresponding rules to approximate real-world scenarios. These are compared against the baseline results taking into account the metrics listed in my post.

• Product testing to ensure that the whole product works end-to-end, including manual testing to approximate the end-user experience.

ObjectVideo focuses on testing our software for release to our partners. Different partners focus on different areas so our partners are in the best position to provide the performance criteria to the end market based upon their own test methodologies, results and sales programs. In this way, they can effectively support their analytics-enabled products and know, as well, that those products are meeting the needs of their customers.

by Edward Troha

Welcome to blogOV, the official blog of ObjectVideo.  On this site, we’ll share information and opinion and commentary about:

• -  the video analytics business in general, especially when someone takes a shot at us (it happens a lot);
• -  our take on new products in the market, including our own;
• -  distinct and interesting tidbits from our extensive work with end users and solution providers;
• -  how the value of having intelligent video capabilities is a more important sell than the analytics themselves (if you don’t believe me you’ll have to read on…);
• -  where we think intelligent technology may be headed over the next few years;
• -  technical and functionality discussions for those of you who are into that;

And general reactions and random inklings on whatever we feel like writing about.   Who knows?  We may report musings from the road, or post a couple thoughts on a particularly challenging problem solved or report on something we think is interesting.  Hopefully you will too.

Of course, let us know what you want to see on this site, and, of course, what you think.  Somehow I don’t think that will be an issue.