COST-EFFECTIVE ENTERPRISE VIDEO SYSTEMS

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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.

Infrastructure 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.

For illustrative purposes, let’s examine a 1,000-camera system spread over 10 sites, streaming at 4 Mbps per camera. If recording is done locally at each facility, it consumes 400 Mbps on the LAN and 4.3 TB of storage per day per site. With a one-month retention policy, over a petabyte of storage is needed for all sites. It is also likely that monitoring operations are centralized in a security/network operations center, which requires video to be streamed to a remote site with dedicated WAN links at hundreds of megabits.

Given these challenges, enterprises are forced to compromise a great deal. One option is to limit video surveillance to forensic evidence — i.e., no active streaming or monitoring, with recorded video reviewed only after an incident occurs. Other options include dropping the resolution and frame rate for video streamed over a WAN, which makes it difficult to detect security violations.

In short, the massive investment in security infrastructure pays poor dividends because incidents cannot be detected and intercepted as they are happening. Fortunately, video analytics present a compelling solution to this problem.

Video Analytics to the Rescue

Video analytics addresses infrastructure challenges by enabling content-aware storage and routing. The software functions like a tireless, unblinking observer—monitoring each camera, detecting relevant events, and deciding what to record and when to stream. An analytics-enabled video management system (VMS) tackles the three core scalability challenges of enterprise video deployments—human resources, storage, and bandwidth—more effectively and cost-efficiently than systems lacking this capability.

Analytics act as a force multiplier, freeing personnel from continuous monitoring and eliminating the need to hire additional staff, even as the number of cameras increases. The software reduces storage requirements by up to 100x by recording only when events of interest occur. It also minimizes bandwidth usage by streaming video only to endpoints that have subscribed to those specific events.

Most surveillance video captures routine activity—such as people entering and exiting a parking lot—or no activity at all, like along a remote fence line. Basic motion detection is often used to reduce video volume, but it frequently triggers false alarms and generates irrelevant footage. Advanced video analytics, by contrast, can be configured to detect specific behaviors—like loitering in a parking lot or someone crossing a fence—and only record or stream video in those cases. It can also alert personnel to issues like video loss or tampering.

Ideally, video analytics software is integrated with the VMS at each site. It intercepts camera feeds and analyzes live video in real time with minimal latency. Events are logged in a database and pushed to alert consoles subscribed to those events. Video associated with these events is also streamed to those consoles. In essence, video analytics acts as a traffic controller, tightly integrated with the VMS. In most cases, an analytics-enabled VMS can be deployed on existing infrastructure with minimal modification.

Video analytics creates a win-win scenario—enabling security teams to prevent incidents rather than respond after the fact, while giving IT staff a scalable, cost-effective solution that’s easier to deploy and manage. This mature technology is fundamentally transforming how enterprises design and operate IP video surveillance systems.

About CheckVideo

CheckVideo is a leader in intelligent video security solutions. Since pioneering breach detection for airports in 1999, CheckVideo has grown to serve thousands of customers with proactive solutions designed to stop crime and prevent losses. By combining advanced AI-based video detection with the award-winning CloudVMS platform, CheckVideo delivers one of the most cost-effective, scalable, and complete video security solutions on the market.

The company holds more than 25 patents covering video detection, compression, and transmission technologies, and has received over 10 industry awards. All CheckVideo software is developed in Virginia and supported by a dedicated team of experienced engineers.

Video analytics provide a win-win situation, by enabling security personnel to prevent crime instead of investigating it after the incident, and by allowing IT staff to provide a compelling solution that is costeffective to deploy and maintain. It greatly reduces the operational expense of a distributed video surveillance solution while allowing centralized administration and monitoring.