IC Realtime Ready to Disrupt Industry With Video Surveillance Search Engine
IC Realtime’s Ella is a Google-like search engine for video surveillance that uses natural language and processes metadata to search through footage.
LAS VEGAS — Over the past few years, electronics such as our smartphones, speakers and even cars have gotten smart. So why hasn’t video surveillance?
There has been little advancement in the dissection of surveillance video when it comes to trying to find exactly what you want.
IC Realtime recognized the need for a quick and efficient way to search for video. According to the company, on average, it takes two and a half hours to find 15 seconds worth of pertinent data.
“We got feedback from the top guys. Almost 85% out of everyone we interviewed said that the most difficult, cumbersome and laborious thing to do was retrieve and find pertinent video in a timely fashion,” Matt Sailor CEO of IC Realtime told SSI.
Today at CES 2018, IC Realtime introduces Ella, a new cloud-based deep learning search engine that augments surveillance systems with natural language search capabilities across recorded video footage.
Ella is essentially a “Google” for finding people, objects and events on surveillance video. No more scrubbing through hours of useless data to find 20 seconds of video.
In fact, Ella was designed with the technology backbone of Camio, a startup founded by ex-Googlers who realized there could be a way to apply search to streaming video feeds.
“Why is it we can query anything in the world in any language and have it return these queries in milliseconds from not cameras with 100 or 200 feeds, but tens of thousands of feeds and it brings us back exactly what we want…Why are we so limited in the way we can query video and why does it take so long to find these bits of information?,” asked Sailor.
With Ella, the user can simply type something such as “FedEx truck,” and Ella can immediately call up the moment a FedEx truck passed in front of the camera. This is because Ella is able to identify both the word “FedEx” as well as a truck, or any make or model car.
Want to find out which rude neighbor isn’t picking up after their dog? Type “dog” into the search bar and you will get an answer almost instantly.
Ella can also save you time by notifying you of anything out of the ordinary. This is because from the moment Ella comes online and is connected, it begins learning and tagging objects the cameras sees.
IC Realtime says Ella features interest-based video compression to avoid issues of limited bandwidth. That means instead of pushing every second of recorded video to the Cloud, Ella uses machine learning algorithms that recognize patterns of motion in each camera scene to recognize what is interesting within each scene.
Ella will only record in HD when it recognizes something important, while uninteresting events are stored in a low-resolution time-lapse format, for 24×7 continuous security coverage that doesn’t take up valuable bandwidth.
“Ella is fully agnostic to brand and streams. Whether its a dated 5-year old analog install or a current 10 megapixel IP system that was just deployed, the beauty of this is with a very small black box at an insignificant entry level price point, you can turn any surveillance system from a basic nanny/dog cam, all the way to up to a city’s security landscape, you can make all those streams intelligent and ‘queriable’ by literally just adding this device,” explains Sailor.
Ella is comprised of an on-premise video gateway device and the Cloud platform subscription. Ella subscription pricing starts at $6.99 per month and increases with storage and analysis features needed for the particular scope of each project. Learn more about the surveillance search engine here.
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About the Author
Steve Karantzoulidis, Web/Senior Editor
Steven A. Karantzoulidis is the Web Editor for Security Sales & Integration. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a degree in Communication and has a background in Film, A/V and Social Media.
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