Smart cities in the world increasingly rely on video analytics for security as well as operational efficiency, which are key objectives for municipal administrators as they seek to provide a more secure and livable environment for residents.
Smart cities in the world increasingly rely on video analytics for security as well as operational efficiency, which are key objectives for municipal administrators as they seek to provide a more secure and livable environment for residents.
That was the point raised by
BriefCam, whose Video Synopsis and deep learning solutions are deployed in various cities to help them get smarter.
Smart city has become an increasingly popular concept across metropolises around the world. Amid rapid urbanization, more and more cities are faced with challenges from traffic congestion to crimes. As a result, they turn to smart technologies to overcome these challenges. And this is where video analytics can come in handy.
“Video content analytics make cities more efficient and ‘smarter’ by quantifying and classifying the number and type of vehicles and visitors, discover their movement patterns, identify hotspots, maximize space utilization and optimize traffic flows,” said Stephanie Weagle, Chief Marketing Officer at BriefCam.
Making cities safe and efficient
One component of smart city is security, and video analytics can play a major role in this regard in several ways, including finding irregular behavior exhibited by individuals and alerting authorities immediately, or performing smart search from piles upon piles of video footage. “The use of video content analytics enables law enforcement, as well as public and private security agencies, the ability to achieve a radically faster time to target by enabling rapid review and search of volumes of video that would otherwise be impossible,” Weagle said.
But increasingly, smart cities are using analytics to achieve further efficiencies as well. “In addition to the safety and security benefits of video content analytics, city surveillance investments are further optimized for a wide range of operational use cases including: analyzing event and traffic patterns to identify optimal sites for business development; combining security with a smart approach to city planning to drive economic investment; monitoring pedestrians and bike routes so traffic engineers can design better paths; and using real-time accident and traffic tracking to re-route motorists to faster or safer routes,” she said.
BriefCam’s Video Synopsis technology, meanwhile, has been deployed in several cities to help them get smart. These include the City of Hartford in Connecticut and the city of Springfield in Massachusetts. Other sites include and Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Statue of Liberty.
“Our breakthrough technology detects, tracks, extracts and identifies people and objects from video, including; men, women, children, clothing, bags, vehicles, animals, size, color, speed, path, direction, dwell time, and more,” Weagle said. “By leveraging this extracted and aggregated video metadata within BriefCam’s embedded BI platform, users can also perform quantitative analysis on their video, derive actionable insights, and visualize them within customizable dashboards, enabling data driven safety, security and operational decision making.”
A recent project was the Real-Time Crime Center operated by the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security (NOHSEP). The center is using BriefCam’s video analytics platform as a key component to improve public safety. The monitoring center captures video footage from strategically mounted cameras and license plate scanners and provides real-time intelligence to the New Orleans Police Department, Fire Department, EMS, NOHSEP and their public safety partners. The center supports the work of incident commanders in the field, providing critical information to quickly assess emergency situations and make informed decisions about keeping New Orleans safe in real-time.
According to the company, since the center opened in November 2017, BriefCam’s video analytics platform has been used on a daily basis and credited in more than 100 cases where it has helped local police and fire departments to solve crimes, manage crowd control, improve pedestrian traffic flow, and investigate security events.