5 Markets to Match With Video Analytics

Find out how five markets can greatly benefit today from the power of this enhanced surveillance tool.

Video surveillance is booming. There are hundreds of millions of video channels in operation around the world, capturing our behavior almost everywhere. And while security has been the primary focus of video surveillance capabilities, commercial uses are becoming more prevalent and valuable to a range of industries through the use of video analytics (VA). From ensuring travelers have a smooth experience at an airport to quickly finding an individual, VA applications are helping organizations meet their business objectives as well as supporting security operations.

The challenge has been that while video captures everything in its view, security operators and law enforcement are forced to manually sift through hours of recordings, which can take hours, even days, and suck up resources and potentially delay issue resolution. It’s a frustrating and common scenario. The information that’s needed is buried and finding it is grueling, painstaking work.

Fortunately, advanced VA technologies are automating many of these manual tasks and, as a result, improving security, operations, marketing, and even the customer experience across a variety of industries. Here are a few examples of how different industries are putting VA applications to work for them.

Airports

A huge area of concern for airports is unauthorized access to restricted areas. In a highly publicized incident at a major airport, a man strolled past a guard at a security checkpoint. This resulted in a six-hour terminal evacuation and shutdown at an estimated cost of $33,600 per minute – a total loss of more than $12 million.

Unless security personnel are stationed at each exit lane, airport officials might not be aware of a security breach until it’s too late. Even if they are aware, police might have to resort to an on-the-ground search to find the person of interest. In these cases, VA can help. Counter-flow detection analytics can instantly alert officials to a person walking the wrong direction through an airport security checkpoint or gate.

Being able to quickly identify and track down the source of a security checkpoint breach or suspicious unattended bag is another area where VA comes into play. A new form of VA designed for real-time forensics is reducing the time it takes to find an individual from hours or days to minutes, enabling authorities to respond to events as they unfold, rather than after the fact. Full body-based analytics solutions, such as NICE Suspect Search, can locate a specific person in video across an entire network of CCTV cameras from almost any angle, including from a raised position – how most are positioned – or from behind.

The solution can also reveal the target’s movements plotted on a map. Using analytics to track individuals who breach sensitive areas not only results in monetary savings; it also mitigates any risk if the people involved had nefarious intentions.

Airport perimeters present another vulnerability due to the great distance they cover. A VA-based perimeter intrusion detection system can play an important role, especially when it’s part of a multilayered solution that combines and correlates other data inputs (e.g. thermal imaging cameras, radar, etc.) through a physical security information management (PSIM) system.

Security is perhaps the most obvious use for VA, but operational effectiveness can be a crucial driver as well. Poorly managed, the process of check-in, security, and passport control can lead to excessive wait times that cause chaos and result in unwanted negative publicity. In addition to being an inconvenience and cause of passenger frustration and stress, check-in delays cut into the time travelers could be spending at the concessions, retail stores, kiosks, and other commercial areas of the airport that are becoming increasingly important to the airport’s bottom line. It’s in the airport’s best interest to move passengers through ticket and security lines and to the sterile side of the airport faster.

By integrating a VA-based crowd detection solution into their situational awareness dashboard, operators can be automatically alerted when lines reach excessive levels, so additional ticket counters or screening stations can be opened and staffed.

The airport can also integrate people-counting VA into a PSIM dashboard and gain access to heat maps that show shopper density at different retail locations at various times of the day. This can give airport retail executives business insight that they can use to justify increased lease rates or to simply reconfigure areas to take advantage of prime locations.

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