Customizations
Boxed solutions are generally not tailored for specific applications. If a customer is looking for one niche solution, it may still be a centralized solution because of the flexibility. It will also be more expensive because the system needs to be trained by engineers, Otterspeer said.
However, meeting customers' real-life needs is an increasingly popular requirement, Li said. “Solutions tailored for industries, ranging from oil and gas to prisons, maximizes value and reliability. For example, solutions for banking provide detection of skimming devices on ATMs, and solutions for airports provide metering of aircraft to tell precisely how long each is parked at the air bridge.”
Another example would be how people counting is used in coastalarea management. “For safety applications, people counting seems to be most interesting for remote ‘pocket beaches,' which are areas that are often off the beaten path and unguarded by lifesavers,” Chandler said. “If a large number of people suddenly appear in an unguarded or remote beach area, that may equate to higher risk if the ocean or water conditions also match up. This type of VCA, which requires accuracy within a range rather than identification of a single human form, is a great example of VCA working in tandem with business rules and VMS-actuated work flows.”
Integration
The power of analytics is greatly enhanced when alarms or events are correlated with those from other functions, such as access control or video management. A unified security platform allows the end user to view information from all the different systems, correlate it and report on it through one interface, said Jumbi Edulbehram, VP of Business Development at Next Level Security Systems. “The combination of this data enables the user to have a fully comprehensive view of security and business operations, and that is what the end user is seeking.”
The challenge in integrating with VMS is that suppliers are focused on storing information and displaying it, Li said. “They're not familiar with the sophistication of VCA metadata, so they don't have the ability to display it. For example, the VCA software may have a function that allows the user to track an individual and know which camera he has passed through over a period of time. However, most VMS systems are just focused on showing raw image scenes; they don't have the capability to ask complex questions nor to display the answers.” To complicate matters, most metadata today is still proprietary, but fortunately there will be a standardized set of metadata in ONVIF 2.0, making it easier to interact and to integrate VCA into other systems, Otterspeer added.
User interface is another problem area. “If the VCA software allows the user to go back to the beginning of an event when the need arises, the metadata to achieve this can be requested from the video analytics system,” Li said. “However, if the VMS's user interface doesn't have a button to activate this function, the user can't get this information.”
VMS integration, thus, requires software developers to work closely to ensure all functionalities can be accessed through a common user interface, and major standards bodies need to pick up their pace in addressing their clients' needs.