“Big Data” has been a hot topic for businesses through 2012, with the Wall Street Journal declaring ‘2012: The Year of Big Data', and the New York Times having an article in early 2012 entitled ‘The Age of Big Data'. “Big Data” refers to a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools.
“Big Data” has been a hot topic for businesses through 2012, with the Wall Street Journal declaring ‘2012: The Year of Big Data', and the New York Times having an article in early 2012 entitled ‘The Age of Big Data'. “Big Data” refers to a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools. What is considered “Big Data” can vary from organization to organization. For some companies, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider their data management options, while for others it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes of data before it becomes a consideration.
The amount of data being created day-to-day is staggering, estimated at 2.5 quintillion bytes by IBM – around 90 percent of all data has been created in the last 2 years alone. The problem with this amount of data is that it is too large, too complex and too disorganized to be analyzed by traditional means. “Big Data” utilises unified large data sets. The trend to single, large data sets allows for additional information to be derived from analysis than would be possible from separate smaller sets with the same amount of total data. Business leaders have responded to this, with CEO's being the number one supporter of big data initiatives, and 59 percent of businesses stating “Big Data Initiatives” are a high/critical priority for the future, according to IDG Enterprise.
In mid-2012, video surveillance got involved with the Big Data trend. HStreaming, a U.S.-based software analytics provider, unveiled real-time video content analysis for Big Data, claiming this software ‘allows customers to process, analyze, visualize, correlate, and react to thousands of concurrent video streams'. The software can analyze thousands of video streams in real time and combine video content analysis and video metadata with other structured and unstructured data sources such as text or transactional data, an approach which is a level above any current video analytics solution, which rely solely on the video feed itself.
The benefits of Big Data are numerous and range across an organization. It allows chief marketing officers to better understand their customers, chief financial officers to better manage their financial performance and mitigate fraud, chief risk officers to mitigate risk and chief operating officers to optimize their operations. All of these benefits come from Big Data helping to find hidden opportunities.
The use of video as Big Data could potentially be combined with the formation of cloud infrastructure which has had some success in 2012. A simple example would involve pushing the video streams and performing the analysis “in the cloud”, and setting up a business model where end-users pay on a per report basis, for example, paying to receive queue length analysis.
While Big Data is not going to be a mainstream concept for video surveillance in 2013, IMS Research predicts that the use and aggregation of analytics and video feed metadata as Big Data will continue to grow, and that businesses looking to utilize Big Data will increasingly look to the potential to incorporate video feed metadata streams into their data sets.