Brent Boe, CEO and Co-Founder of Vintra delves into the advantages that Wave 2 analytics offers to organizations seeking to detect and minimize security threats.

Today’s security professionals are forced to wear many hats, contributing largely to inputs and outputs historically demanded of other departments. In many ways, this is a good thing. However, security professionals are often much like referees and umpires: the best are the ones you never notice and the expectations are high.

Every threat must be deterred, every high-stress security event must be responded to perfectly and every investigation requires lightning-fast resolution with a crystal-clear outcome. This all must be done while parked in a GSOC, with regularly changing health and safety protocols, legacy tech that doesn’t talk to the new tech and with an underfunded budget that many in the C-suite see as a cost center rather than a revenue-enabler. To say security professionals in today’s climate are overwhelmed and underfunded is an understatement.

That is why modern advanced video analytics providers have introduced the second wave of video analytics. Wave 2 analytics go beyond what was possible under Wave 1 analytics to give security professionals the tools they need to detect potential threats earlier, respond to ongoing incidents smarter and dramatically increase investigative results. This effectively allows security teams to scale their security capabilities while maintaining or reducing headcount.

Wave 2 video analytics

From birth, humans are conditioned to take in a variety of factors in order to make sense of the world around them. It helps to think of intelligent video analytics in this way too, given that AI is largely based on adapting human thinking for technology purposes.

Based on this idea, Wave 1 video analytics are very much stuck in the early years. These types of analytic solutions work to extract both definitive and data from video feeds, much like babies beginning to identify the shapes and colors around them. Security professionals can use definitive and descriptive information to respond to security events as they happen, however there is little to no context. Without context, the security professionals responding to such events are left to fill in the gaps, introducing the opportunity for errors, inefficiencies and a general lack of situational awareness.

As the human brain evolves, so do video analytics. If the first wave was about information and data gathering, then the second wave is about providing recommendations and answers. Wave 2 video analytics builds upon the information from Wave 1 analytics to correlate people, places and things as a means of better understanding events and event history.

Pattern-of-life discoveries and context-rich alerting functions – hallmarks of Wave 2 solutions – work inherently alongside human operators to provide clarity by placing the burden of responsibility on the system itself. In short, analytics, like humans, have evolved to learn how to best apply past experiences, known patterns, available data at-hand and perceived potential outcomes to receive clarity on a given situation. This is how video analytics are moving beyond the bounding box, past identification and categorization, to include correlation and even remediation.

The practical applications of Wave 2

Wave 2 video analytic solutions have the potential to impact organizations of all sizes. In fact, it is hard to name an industry that would not benefit greatly from such solutions. However, it is the critical, enterprise operations that stand to benefit the most from Wave 2 deployments. The below industries and Wave 2 solutions outlined below serve as a small example of what is possible under the new second wave.

For public safety – Pattern-of-life discoveries are a prime example of the computing and understanding power offered by Wave 2 video analytics. Using machine learning, correlation link analysis tools quickly establish distinct patterns, match events to those patterns and find anomalies where known patterns are violated using past and present video data. Correlation link analysis helps users understand not only the relationships between individuals, but also build out the larger “web” of activity of persons of interest related to issues such as trafficking, theft and other criminal activities.

Using a unique visual fingerprint, the correlation link analysis tool does all the work, reviewing data from potentially thousands of video inputs to quickly identify the path of the person of interest through a facility or area. Then the system itself correlates who the potential associates of this person are, where they met, on what dates and at what time. Moreover, pattern recognition can be applied beyond individuals to include vehicles and distinct objects, further enhancing the correlations between people, places and things. It is these “pattern-of-life” discoveries that can assist public safety teams in their mission to quickly identify persons of interest and their larger network.

For healthcare – In every hospital there are machines, pumps and other pieces of life-saving equipment that need to be carefully monitored and protected to ensure availability when needed. Wave 1 video analytics may try to prevent the theft of such equipment by using line-crossing analytics, however this will likely result in a high number of false alarms every time the equipment is being accessed by an authorized individual. Wave 2 offers a better way by providing purpose-built analytic solutions capable of tracking and locating specific pieces of equipment and/or individuals without the use of physical tracking devices or facial recognition. 

Instead of utilizing an open-source solution, healthcare and other organizations can receive a tailor-made video analytic designed to detect and classify the exact piece of equipment necessary. To do so, Wave 2 analytics make use of unique approaches like synthetic training data and transfer learning to extract relevant and potent information about the scene at hand. Given that Wave 2 solutions are built upon flexible model architectures, it is easy to add new detection categories quickly and accurately, so the solution is ready to use in days, not months. With a custom-made analytic, healthcare providers can better oversee the use of valuable medical equipment without being frustrated by regular nuisance alarms.

For first responders – Wave 1 video analytics are known to work well on fixed cameras, but their ability to derive information from other imaging solutions stops there.In industries that rely on multiple camera types, Wave 1 offers limited options. First responders, for example, make use of a variety of different camera types and video sources including body-worn cameras, infrared cameras and even drones. Wave 2 rectifies this issue, allowing new analytic solutions to be applied across varying imaging solutions. This allows new industries to make use of a wider range of video analytics that they perhaps were unable to access before.

Wave 2 beyond security

It is understood that the security professionals do more than just manage security. That is perhaps truer now than ever, as the lines between security and other departments begin to blur. Armed with existing video surveillance and Wave 2 analytics, security teams now oversee an increasingly valuable and granular organizational asset: data about what is going on in a physical space. This data is essential for security applications, yet this same data can be fed to other stakeholders across an enterprise to deliver even greater value. It is this additional value that can make all the difference in organizations where security spending is limited. 

Examples include a video analytic that creates a heat map of spaces within an office to determine positive and negative space utilization for future real estate developments. With Wave 2 analytics, safety and management teams can also quickly identify and remediate when an employee is engaging in prohibited behavior (for example, when an employee has entered a restricted area or is operating machinery without proper protective gear). 

The ability to detect such behaviors faster and drive policy changes produces cost savings in real dollars. While deriving value from video surveillance is difficult at scale, Wave 2 analytics allows organizations to turn physical security from an operating expense to a profit center.  

This article was originally published in the February edition of Security Journal Americas, in the Special Report on Entry Solutions. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.