The eye of A.I: Powering smart video surveillance

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has the power to transform the value of data across industries—and we are seeing enough examples of the same in the world around us. One of the biggest, though not-so-well-known, transformations powered by A.I. has been of the CCTV security industry. Over 116 million network cameras were shipped in the professional surveillance market last year, with the capability to generate almost 9 petabytes of video data every day. Here, A.I. has enabled the integration of technology with the traditional surveillance practices, leading to the development of smart video solutions that transcend beyond surveillance.

From Eye to A.I.

The application of AI and data analytics in the area of conventional video surveillance has given rise to intelligent video analytics. With A.I. playing a critical role in using computer intelligence capabilities, including object recognition, movement detection, and tracking or counting objects/people; It has created a technological edge for the users that no traditional security camera alone can offer.

This is driving the shift beyond the traditional security-focused surveillance and adoption of new use cases that could be referred to as smart video, where cameras, storage, processing, and deep learning algorithms combine to deliver solutions that have not seen daylight before.

Growing number of new use cases

An obvious example of the current pandemic is the growing adoption of thermal cameras within healthcare to detect elevated skin temperatures in a non-invasive and contactless method. Another interesting use case is in the field of sports analytics where video analytics aids in an in-depth analysis of the sports video footage, identifying actions of interest that can help train athletes and players to improve their game and so much more. What is more, building management, smart city management as well as agriculture, among others, are seeing the greater deployment of cameras for remote monitoring and are some of the innovative ways in which A.I. is merging with video to create a future-ready smarter world.

Storage that is ready for A.I.

The evolution in the smart video is simultaneously creating an urgent need for capturing, retaining, analysing the huge volume of data being generated, thus propelling the need for surveillance grade storage that will support AI requirements like metadata tagging etc.

Understanding how the workload is changing—be it at the edge related to the CCTV camera, the video recorder, or at the cloud end—is essential to ensuring that new architectural changes are augmented by continuous innovation in storage technology.

As it becomes a common practice to use cameras with higher resolutions, both storage drives and microSD cards are also getting an upgrade in capacity and performance to accommodate the growing need to manage content for AI requirements.

As applications of A.I.-enabled surveillance grow, customer expectations too are evolving. No longer are they satisfied by merely capturing the video, they want to be able to make decisions based on real-time and historic data, and the gamut of Surveillance grade HDDs and microSD cased based storage solutions available today like WD Purple are making it possible for the customers to do just that.

Views are personal. The author is Director of Marketing, India, Western Digital.