Smart and Smarter?

Standard vs. High End
General functions of VCA include abandoned object detection; congestion detection; counter flow; motion detection; behavior recognition; trajectory tracking; shape-based detection/object tracking; theft detection; virtual tripwire; people/vehicle counting; face recognition; ALPR/LPR.

 

Some of these functions are common and standard while others are only available in high-end or advanced VCA. “The most common VCA systems base their alarms on motion detection (frame difference) or pixel analysis (background modeling). These systems often rely on characteristics such as object height and width, and require manually fine-tuning the VCA to achieve desired performance levels,” according to Mahesh Saptharishi, President and CTO of VideoIQ. Meanwhile, high-end VCAs are more universal and multi-faceted and offer a wide range of evaluation, analysis, and storage possibilities. “They can include advanced features such as conditional alarming or combination events such as ‘Alarm if Event A in Camera-1 and Event B in Camera-2 happens' and ability to send device triggers on VCA alarms,” said Sadiye Guler, Founder President of  intuVision. Advanced VCA incorporates background/foreground separation, auto-learning, and auto-calibration, on top of frame comparison; special-purpose analytics or high-end analytics go one step ahead and use recognition techniques in the image such as 2D and 3D face recognition and optical character recognition for ALPR/LPR to compare to existing database, according to Sumit Aggarwal, Founder of i2V Systems. “High-end VCA also has special features for accurate counting: including simultaneous bi-directional counting for people walking in groups or side-by-side, ignore suitcases, children's carriages, and shopping trolleys, shadow filters for front of store applications where sunlight and shadows coming through windows can cause problems, on-screen counters, in-camera counting database, count reporting, etc.,” added Geoff Thiel, CEO of VCA Technology.

 

Depending on user preference and application requirements, video intelligence in the front and back end has its demand across different sectors. Edge devices can be used in locations where standard VCA is enough, while server-based VCA can be used to analyze areas in need of more precise calculations due to the changing environment. With the different features provided by both high-end and standard VCA, operators are able to more efficiently monitor areas under surveillance.