Friday, April 26, 2013

Video Analytics industry will be triple in 8 Years up to 39 Billion


Intelligent Video Surveillance, VCA & Video Analytics: Technologies & Global Market - 2013-2020


NEW YORK, March 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available in its catalogue:
http://www.reportlinker.com/p01154046/Intelligent-Video-Surveillance-VCA--Video-Analytics-Technologies--Global-Market-–-2013 2020.html#utm_source=prnewswire&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=Security_Systems
Following three decades of slow market penetration and disappointing performance, the Intelligent Video Surveillance, VCA & Video Analytics industry will experience a decade of rapid growth.
The "Intelligent Video Surveillance, VCA & Video Analytics: Technologies & Global Market – 2013-2020" report indicates that the global Intelligent Video Surveillance (IVS) & Video Analytics (VA) industry revenues* totaled $13.5 billion in 2012, and are estimated to reach $39 billion in 2020.
The rapid market growth is driven by the following dynamics:
Increased use of video surveillance.
Migration from analog to digital cameras and to IP based cameras.
Technology maturity. Video analytics algorithms, processors, applications and products underwent a decade of technological evolution to intelligent video processing, based on advancements in image processing, enabling automatic detection of signatures detection and identification.
Cost reduction of video analytic systems. Driven by the falling prices of image processing DSPs and communication systems.
Cost-performance of new edge-based video analytics DSP technologies (e.g., Intel, Texas Instruments DSPs).
Human operators entail high cost & high rate of overlooked events. Real time analysis of video images and recorded footage is a need that can hardly be answered effectively by human operators, and manpower cost. Furthermore, human operators fatigue and boredom cause a high rate of overlooked events.
It takes IVS, VCA and VA to process trillions of video surveillance-hours generated annually. By 2011 over 165 million video surveillance cameras installed worldwide captured 1.4 trillion video-hours. Growing at a CAGR of 9-11%, captured video surveillance will reach approximately 3.3 Trillion video-hours in 2020. A hypothetical analysis assuming that 20% of the most critical video stream should have been reviewed by human operators, results in a (hypothetical) need to employ (by 2011) a workforce of over 100 million operators (working 8 hours daily, 300 days a year).
In the past year, Intelligent video surveillance and video analytics with mature technology have attracted a lot of attention. HSRC estimates that the global market* will triple by 2020.
HSRC's "Intelligent Video Surveillance, VCA & Video Analytics: Technologies & Global Market – 2013-2020" report addresses this multi-billion market.
This landmark report is a resource for busy executives with commercial interests in the industry. It has been explicitly customized for decision makers to identify business opportunities, developing technologies, market trends and risks, as well as to benchmark business plans.
The report presents in 474 pages, 115 tables and 158 figures, analysis of 55 current and pipeline technologies and 113 leading vendors.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Video Analytics technology used by the Law Enforcement in Boston Marathon Bombing



How video analytics helps reconstruct Boston Marathon bombings

           By Rutrell Yasi, Apr 18, 2013 
            http://gcn.com/articles/2013/04/18/how-video-analytics-reconstruct-boston-marathon-bombings.aspx


Video from surveillance cameras and people’s cell phones are increasingly valuable resources in helping investigators collect and analyze data from crime scenes, such as the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Investigators are combing through hours of digital feeds and thousands of photographs to identify suspects responsible for detonating two bombs there on April 15.
On Thursday morning, authorities were reportedly set to release photos of two suspects in the bombings, although the analysis of all that footage will undoubtedly continue, as the police and FBI seeks to piece together the chain of events. (UPDATE: The FBI released photos of the suspects Thursday night, asking for help in identifying them. Later, one of the suspects, identified as brothers, was killed in a confrontation with police that also left a security officer dead, and the second suspect was still being sought.)
But how do investigators weed through terabytes of video in different formats, whether 30-second snippets from cell phones or hours of footage from a surveillance camera at a nearby store? Going through all that footage is still largely a labor-intensive task, but video analytics and digital forensics tools can help investigators compress video, pinpoint areas of interest, look for anomalies and find relevant details, according to government and industry experts.
Many video surveillance systems come packaged with analytics that can detect anomalies, such as a package left behind or a person entering a restricted area, said Maj. David Mulholland, commander of technical services with the United States Park Police.   Because humans can’t watch multiple security feeds without being overwhelmed or losing attention, analytics software signals -- visually or through audio --  if someone enters a stairway where no person should be, he said.
There are also video analytics tools that compress long hours of video. Video Synopsis, a tool for CCTV surveillance systems from Briefcam, an Israel-based company with offices in Connecticut, lets investigators pinpoint an area of interest and show only the moments where something was different in that picture. Admittedly, that would be more challenging in a race, where something is changing every second than, say, at an office overnight where someone might take a folder off a desk, make copies and return the folder, Mulholland said. But instead of watching eight hours of video, investigators can compress the footage down to the three-minute period in which the folder was taken from the desk. That’s a start, a baseline, he said.
“The next thing you can do with the analytic capability is identify an area of interest within the camera frame,” Mulholland said. For example, once investigators have identified the origin of a detonation of a bomb, they can draw an area of interest. There may have been 500 people who walked in that general area, but the analytics piece will ignore that and flag anything that changed in that one specific area—such as a backpack being left behind. So instead of spending 20 minutes looking at video in which nothing happens, the investigator can hit a button and in 30 seconds go to the area of interest and then begin to dissect what actually happened, Mulholland noted.
There are different flavors of this software out on the market. BRS Labs’ AISight, a behavioral analysis system for video surveillance, adaptively “learns” behavior patterns in complex environments. The video surveillance software uses a reason-based approach versus legacy rules-based technology, company officials say. Because humans are not required to define the rules for object or behavior recognition, the system can easily scale to thousands of cameras.
But the ability to define parameters is a critical feature for video analytics software, Mulholland said. For example, there might be a gateway into the viewing area of a venue that people are only supposed to exit through — so someone entering through the exit could be of interest. You would want to define a parameter saying, “show me if someone is going against the normal flow of pedestrian traffic.” Or if investigators know a suspect was wearing a red shirt, they could put that into the parameters and say, “show me someone who is wearing a red shirt.”
Data and time-based review video submitted by ordinary citizens and the use of various image and pattern recognition software might also help identify potential suspects in the bombing, according to Lee Neubecker, president of Forensicon, a developer of digital forensic tools.
Neubecker demonstrated how he analyzed video of one of the bomb blasts that was submitted toBoston.com.  By slowing the video down and colorizing it, he was able to show debris from the explosion hurling through a window of a nearby building, which could point investigators to debris from the pressure cooker bomb. Then investigators could determine where the pressure cooker was manufactured and analyze sales receipts from local retailers.  Using facial recognition software and video forensics, they then could cross reference security video of people buying pressure cookers with images — such as those of the two suspects — taken at the marathon finish line, Neubecker said.
Because they consider no piece of information or detail too small, the FBI and Boston police have urged people to send visual images, video, and/or details regarding the explosions along the Boston Marathon route and elsewhere, to boston@ic.fbi.gov. By mid-day Tuesday, the day after the bombing, over 2,000 tips had been received by law enforcement.  With thousands and thousands of hours of video, law enforcement will not be able to move quickly through them without some form of video analytics, Mulholland said.
Some challenges remain on the surveillance side too, according to Mulholland. Many older cameras use proprietary formats, which cannot be read by analytic tools. “We have to make sure the systems we are putting out are in a standardized format where we can apply any type of forensic tool,” he said.
With so many cameras, whether personal or surveillance, in use, crimes like the Boston Marathon bombing will be documented with terabytes of images and footage. Analytics tools that help investigators sort through the events will be increasingly important in solving those crimes.

About the Author
Rutrell Yasin is senior editor for Government Computer News.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Algar - Brazilian telecom goes open source


Algar telecom goes open source

Algar telecom, leading mobile services in Brazil goes open source based on Mobicents communication platform, teaming with TeleStax (open source developer).

SAO PAULO /PRNewswire/

An innovative project in Brazil is making Linux-based middleware for mobile telecom services as easy to create as a website. Algar Telecom is the fast growing mobile network operator (MNO) in Brazil. Many MNO's around the world are now finding themselves in direct competition with international over-the-top (OTT) service providers like Skype and Google Voice. To survive, they needed to find a way to rapidly and cheaply build out new telecom services and offerings, but the existing hardware and software offer limited extensibility for new features and similarly little flexibility for interoperability with other systems. In addition, they depend on innovation as a way to reduce the high development and deployment costs associated with traditional telecom systems.

Mobicents is the leading open Source Cloud Communication Platform. It provide a run-time environment and comprehensive suite of tools for development, deployment and management of services integrating voice, video and messaging across a range of communication networks.