The five considerations in advancing video surveillance in security
technology capable of learning relies on computing power, which requires organizations to ensure that all elements of the system have the potential to scale to meet the needs of even larger video surveillance operations. Scalability is crucial; the sheer amount of video surveillance now being deployed is staggering. Manual operations are expensive and limit the effective scalability of the system; if the video surveillance system cannot scale, the set up could require the hand calibration of each camera when it is set up and hand tuning to define security zones. Scalable systems will allow the video surveillance system to add cameras and video fields over time so that as an organization grows, its video surveillance system will grow with it. Organizations deploying video surveillance will need an enterprise-class architecture that can scale in order to manage all the hardware and servers necessary to analyze the video.
Compatibility for multiple video technologies. Once the video streams are concentrated or stored, what happens next? A level of compatibility is required if the video analytics solutions need to transmit video streams to an analytic engine so that different types of applications can consume and process the video. The more scalable video surveillance systems embrace open non-proprietary video standards, using network protocols such as Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), so that they can publish the video to as many people as possible. As systems become more complex, it becomes more important to be able to buy compatible products from best-of-breed vendors. Even though some video surveillance vendors attempt to be one-stop shops, the customer’s need for scalability and compatibility will drive the move away from proprietary camera systems to standards-based solutions. The innovation occurring in video analysis happens quickly, and the need to deploy these innovations is critical. With so much innovation and demand for deployment, it is critical that open standards be used to allow for maximum compatibility.
Digitized video and security. Today, a full video infrastructure includes cameras, viewing stations, video storage and recall, video analytics, and analytic processing. It may include remote monitoring or publishing video to remote locations, and it may require encryption of the video stream. Video is data — data that enters the realm of IT. Like any other type of data, digitized video must be analyzed, shared, transferred, archived, searched, and more. With video surveillance as a data technology, security personnel will have to handle video data just like any other data. Video data will have to be integrated into the data security infrastructure, electronically signed to prove it has not been tampered with, tied into the IT infrastructure’s existing permission and security systems so security can control who views it, and encoded for transmission. Incident management will be an important aspect of handling security events.
Joint standards efforts. Today, standards efforts for video data are still in their infancy. Vendors have formed standards boards without actually talking with one another. Vendors and standards bodies are just beginning to look at enacting guidelines for how to plug different parts of different technologies together: How data will be transmitted, how video streams will be encoded, and so on. But these efforts are splintered. “True interoperability, however, is usually not achieved via vendor-driven organizations,” Eaton writes. “Interoperable, large-scale video surveillance solutions will only be achieved with the participation of end-user organizations. By insisting on standards and compliance the industry can work toward a video surveillance solution that will be valuable and accessible”
