Here’s also where the consumer electronics industry has helped us. Computers and analytics are already sifting through mountains of video, silently poring over it for faces, inappropriate images, copy-righted/pirated material, etc. We just happen to know that as Facebook or YouTube. It’s impressive to note that 100 hours per minute of video flows up to YouTube every day. All that massive amount of video goes through a virtual carwash of analytics looking for useful information.
The security industry hasn’t been left out. Retail analytics can now be hosted and run directly from the camera. It’s not a big leap … your mobile smartphone is doing all these things now, so it’s a natural extension to push it into modern IP security cameras. Cataloging and tagging the video data and providing path maps, heat maps and distilling everything down into information makes that video actionable, searchable and valuable.
With all of those tools and techniques, you can now make use of a smaller local hard drive, or an unlimited cloud storage option to store the information. The bulky high resolution video gets relegated to a cold store repository. What you end up with is cheap, easy-to-access storage, and often more importantly, dramatically low power per GB. For every electrical watt of power that it takes to drive a hard drive, it typically takes one-two watts to cool it. Aggregating that storage and/or simply turning off the hard drives not in use makes a ton of sense and saves real dollars. That’s a ‘green’ initiative most people can get behind.
Ian Johnston is CTO for Digital Watchdog and has 15 years of video surveillance and software industry experience.
